Xavier Bichat

Marie Francois Xavier Bichat (1771 to 1802) was a French anatomist and pathologist, widely called the father of modern histology. Born in Thoirette in Franche-Comte, he studied anatomy and surgery at Lyon and then in Paris under Pierre-Joseph Desault at the Hotel-Dieu. Working without a microscope, he distinguished 21 types of elementary tissue from which the organs of the body are built, and he treated organs as collections of tissues rather than as self-contained units. His books include the Traite des membranes, the Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort and the four volume Anatomie generale. He was a vitalist who defined life as the set of functions that resist death. He was appointed physician to the Hotel-Dieu in 1800 and died of a fever at the age of thirty, after opening many hundreds of bodies to study the effects of disease. The buccal fat pad is also called Bichat fat pad in his memory. This record describes a historical scientist and is not medical advice.