Abstract
Xavier Bichat was born on 14 November 1771 in France at Thoirette in the Jura during the reign of Louis XV. He began his medical studies in Lyon where in 1791 he met his first mentor, Marc-Antoine Petit (1766–1811), who taught him the rudiments of surgery. He then went to Paris where he worked as a pupil of Pierre-Joseph Desault (1744–95), the famous Surgeon-in-Chief of the Grand Hospice of Humanity, as his pupil, collaborator and friend (The Grand Hospice de l'Humanité formerly was known as Hôtel-Dieu but the name was changed by French revolutionaries who considered it too ‘religious’). Bichat honoured Desault by publishing his Oeuvres Chirurgicales (Surgical Works) after his death. He succeeded Desault in his position in the hospital and worked relentlessly in ‘a real race against time’, as Léon Binet (1891–1971) put it. He also opened a private school to demonstrate autopsies and physiological experiments to students.
With remarkable intuition and ignoring out-of-date traditional beliefs, he demonstrated the new idea that the various tissues in the body are distributed according to their anatomically functional structure and physiological role. Consequently he is considered to be the real father of histology, although he never used a microscope. This indefatigable practitioner was also a prolific author and bequeathed to posterity some fundamental works, including his famous Traité des Membranes (Treatise on Membranes), his Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort (Physiological Researches upon Life and Death) and his Anatomie Générale Appliquée à la Physiologie et à la Médecine (General Anatomy applied to Physiology and Medicine). These masterpieces, visionary in the avant-garde ideas and infinite perspectives they present, had a profound influence on medicine and contributed widely to forging Bichat's fame.
Already a celebrity, he died in Paris on 22 July 1802 at the age of 30, possibly from the consequences of infection of a wound sustained during an autopsy. The death of this meteoric medical figure who ploughed a fertile furrow in just a few years of colossal work aroused general mourning. Jean-Nicolas Corvisart (1755–1821) honoured him in a letter written to the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, in which he emphasized that ‘nobody ever did so much and so well in so little time’. The writer Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) later acknowledged Bichat's great contribution to medicine by commenting in 1857 in Madame Bovary that the character Dr Larivière belonged to ‘the great school of surgery begotten of Bichat’. Xavier Bichat rests today in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. His effigy appears on the tympanum of the Pantheon and, even more noteworthy, he is the only person whose statue is in the courtyard of the former Faculty of Medicine of Paris (Figure 1).
The statue of Xavier Bichat in Paris by David D'Angers
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Pierre Joly for his valuable assistance.