Bichat

1987 · Best.-Nr. 120343AB — 1987. Special reprint edition of Boston Cummings and Hilliard 1813. Birmingham AL The Classics of Medicine Library 1987. 13.5 cm x 22.5 cm. XIX 259 pages. Beautiful Hardcover with gilt lettering and ornament on spine with raised bands. Gilt designs to both boards. Marbled pastedowns and endpapers. All edges gilt. Beaver-brown silk ribbon bookmarker. Near fine condition. With protective mylar jacket. Bookplate of preowner stating "This is copy number 541 of the Classics of Medicine Library edition". Includes for example the following: General Considerations on the Classification of the Membranes / Of Mucous Membranes / Of Serous Membranes / Of Fibrous Membranes / Of Compound Membranes / Membranes Not Classed / Of Membranes Resulting from Disease /On the Arachnoid Membrane / Of the Synovial Membrane etc. Marie François Xavier Bichat 14 November 1771 – 22 July 1802 was a French anatomist and pathologist known as the father of modern histology. Bichat studied anatomy and surgery under Marc-Antoine Petit chief surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu in Lyon. In 1793 he became a pupil then assistant of Pierre-Joseph Desault surgeon and anatomist in Paris. After his teacher’s death in 1795 Bichat completed the fourth volume of Desault’s Journal de chirurgie adding a biographical memoir of its author. In addition to his observations at the bedsides of patients at the Hôtel Dieu Bichat studied the postmortem changes induced in various organs by disease. Without knowledge of the cell as the functional unit of living things he was among the first to visualize the organs of the body as being formed through the differentiation of simple functional units or tissues. This view he developed in Traité des membranes 1800; “Treatise on Membranes”. Although he worked without a microscope Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of the human body are composed. Encyclopedia Britannica hardcover