17 Facts About Xavier Bichat

Xavier Bichat was "the first to propose that tissue is a central element in human anatomy, and he considered organs as collections of often disparate tissues, rather than as entities in themselves".

Xavier Bichat's father was Jean-Baptiste Bichat, a physician who had trained in Montpellier and was Bichat's first instructor.

Xavier Bichat's mother was Jeanne-Rose Bichat, his father's wife and cousin.

Xavier Bichat entered the college of Nantua, and later studied at Lyon.

Xavier Bichat made rapid progress in mathematics and the physical sciences, but ultimately devoted himself to the study of anatomy and surgery under the guidance of Marc-Antoine Petit, chief surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu of Lyon.

In 1797, Xavier Bichat began a course of anatomical demonstrations, and his success encouraged him to extend the plan of his lectures, and boldly to announce a course of operative surgery.

Xavier Bichat began another work, under the title Anatomie descriptive, in which the organs were arranged according to his peculiar classification of their functions but lived to publish only the first two volumes.

Xavier Bichat was anxious to determine with more precision than had been attempted before, the effects of remedial agents, and instituted with this view a series of direct experiments which yielded a vast store of valuable material.

On 8 July 1802, Xavier Bichat fell in a faint while descending a set of stairs at the Hotel-Dieu.

Xavier Bichat has fallen on a field of battle which numbers many a victim; no one has done in the same time so much and so well.

Xavier Bichat is considered to have been a vitalist, though in no way an anti-experimentalist:.

Xavier Bichat moved from the tendency typical of the French vitalistic tradition to progressively free himself from metaphysics in order to combine with hypotheses and theories which accorded to the scientific criteria of physics and chemistry.

Xavier Bichat thought that animals exhibited vital properties which could not be explained through physics or chemistry.

Xavier Bichat's division is not new, and closely parallels the Platonic and later Christian division of body and soul, and the animism of Paracelsus, van Helmont, Georg Stahl and the Montpellier school of medicine.

Xavier Bichat did not use a microscope because he distrusted it; therefore his analyses did not include any acknowledgement of cellular structure.

Xavier Bichat is represented on the Pantheon's pediment, of which the bas-relief is D'Angers' work as well.

The name of Xavier Bichat is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.