Félix Vicq-d'Azyr

Félix Vicq d'Azyr was a French physician and anatomist, born at Valognes in Normandy in 1748 and dead in 1794, whom the article credits as the originator of comparative anatomy and discoverer of the theory of homology in biology. The son of a physician, he graduated in medicine at the University of Paris and from 1773 taught a celebrated anatomy course at the Jardin du Roi. He entered the Académie des Sciences in 1774 with the support of Condorcet and won a seat in the Académie française in 1788 for his eulogies of colleagues. As Perpetual Secretary of the Société Royale de Médecine from 1775 he led its compilation of facts on diseases and food resources, and he was the last physician of Queen Marie-Antoinette. As an anatomist he was one of the first to use coronal sections of the brain and alcohol in dissection, and he described the locus coeruleus and the substantia nigra in 1786.