Xavier Bichat Research Articles

Fidgeting Fingers and Fickle Flesh in Flaubert

ABSTRACT Writing about Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze comments on the body as the ‘zone of indiscernibility' between man and animal, especially ‘as it is flesh or meat.' Bacon's fleshy zone, I argue, finds an early illustration in Madame Bovary, where Flaubert will also incorporate notions of ‘animal life’ as described by the nineteenth-century pathologist, Xavier Bichat. This essay will examine these fleshy zones as they relate to changing ideas of skin, tactility, and those, fluid permeable zones between human and animal and between individual bodies and the penetrating forces of others and the environment.

Buccal Fat Pad: "Glandula" of Heister or "Boule Graisseuse" of Bichat?

Two prominent personalities in Medicine, Lorenz Heister (1683-1758) and Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), compete for the attribution of the discovery of the buccal fat pad (BFP). A careful reading of the original texts reported here, seems to identify Bichat as the first to describe the BFP. However, Heister most probably was the first to describe an accessory parotid gland.

Laennecs’ mediate auscultation: Child's play

Before Laennec, respiratory diseases that we recognize today were often confused, because the heart and lung are locked inside the rib cage. Impressed by the autopsies performed by Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), Laennec maintained the importance of the anatomoclinical method. But he indicated in his early 1820s lectures at the Collège de France that the discovery of auscultation was fortuitous and empirical. Duffin demonstrates that medical discoveries hardly obey an implacable logic, they arise outside of pre-established projects. In this paper, we retrace the chronology and antecedents at the origin of the important medical invention that is the stethoscope.

Anatomy, modern histology, and their mentors

Anatomy is a secular science that had contributions from great anatomists, mainly doctors. In the 16th century, modern anatomy emerged, and the studies of the physician and anatomist Andreas Vesalius, "father of modern anatomy", corrected the errors of his predecessors through human dissection and revolutionized the writing of anatomy with his work. Almost 200 years later, Marie François Xavier Bichat is "father of histology", contributed significantly to the description of tissues, expanding the studies of macroscopic anatomy to microscopic. In this article, the authors revisit the findings of anatomists notorious and their significant preliminary contributions to the current planning of surgical interventions.

Xavier Bichat and the renovation of the pathological anatomy.

Xavier Bichat, who lived a short life (1771-1802), was prominent French anatomist and physiologist during the time of revolution and one of the founders of French scientific medicine. He played a key role in the creation of the science of histology. Indeed, he was the first to see the organs of the body as being formed through the specialization of simple, functional units (tissues). Bichat is also known as one of the last of the major theorists of vitalism.

HF01-04 THE BIRTH OF UROLOGY AS A SURGICAL SPECIALTY AFTER THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 May 2022HF01-04 THE BIRTH OF UROLOGY AS A SURGICAL SPECIALTY AFTER THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Philip Van Kerrebroeck Philip Van KerrebroeckPhilip Van Kerrebroeck More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000002541.04AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: Urology as a separate recognised surgical specialty started in France in 1890 when Félix Guyon was nominated as ‘Professeur d’Urologie’ at the University of Paris and opened the first department of Urology. This development originated from Urogenital Surgery as a consequence of the principles of the French Revolution. This study aims at documenting the mechanisms and individuals that explain how the French Revolution was the basis for the birth of Urology. METHODS: Based on a literature search and additional research of original documents, the development of Urogenital Surgery into Urology after the French Revolution was documented and studied. RESULTS: Before the French Revolution there was no well organized healthcare in France and by extension in Europe. Medical treatment was performed by travelling quacks (a.o. stone cutters/lithotomists) and surgeon-barbers. However, the French Revolution of 1789 caused a radical change also in medicine. The social role of the medical system was questioned, and medical doctors were considered corrupt and useless. The revolutionaries established ‘new style’ hospitals and adapted medical training with early practical training. The ‘Collegia Medica’ (guilds of doctors) were abolished, and the development of medical (sub)specialties was promoted. Several medical doctors interested in urogenital pathology were early revolutionaries and promoted the early developments of Urogenital Surgery into a separate specialty with specific training. Amongst them Jean Paul Marat, Pierre Joseph DESAULT, François CHOPART and Marie François Xavier BICHAT. Also Joseph SOUBERBIELLE (1754-1846), who performed >1200 suprapubic lithotomies, and was a descendant of the famous perineal lithotomist Jean Baseilhac (Frère Côme), was an active revolutionary. Jean CIVIALE (1792–1867) one of the first proto-urologist studied with Souberbielle and started a specific department for “Surgery of the Urinary Tract” in 1829. His pupil Jean Casimir Félix GUYON (1831-1920) accepted in 1890 a nomination as ‘Professeur d’Urologie’, and changed the name of his department into ‘Service d’Urologie’. This was the start of Urology as a recognized separate surgical specialty. CONCLUSIONS: The French Revolution changed medicine significantly and (sub)specialization was initiated. Several urogenital surgeons were politically active during the French Revolution and promoted Urogenital Surgery, leading to proto-Urology and in 1890 to the birth of Urology as a separate recognised surgical specialty. Source of Funding: None © 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 207Issue Supplement 5May 2022Page: e212 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Philip Van Kerrebroeck More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

БИША МАРИ ФРАНСУА КСАВЬЕ (1771-1802)

The article tells about the great French surgeon, anatomist and physiologist Marie-François Xavier Bichat, the founder of science about tissues – histology, discoverer in an anatomy and creator of such medical disciplines, as a thanatology (science about death) and pathoanatomy. The most essential moments and facts from biography of scientist are described, his basic scientific insights are briefly expounded. Main scientific works and publications, and also described by Bichat anatomic structures and formations are enumerated. His name is carried on by several eponyms in anatomy fossa (pterygopalatine fossa), Bichat’s protuberance (buccal fat pad), Bichat’s foramen (cistern of the vena magna of Galen), Bichat’s ligament (lower fasciculus of the posterior sacroiliac ligament), Bichat’s fissure (transverse fissure of the brain) and Bichat’s tunic (tunica intima vasorum). The substantive provisions of the scientific conceptions offered to them in morphology and pathoanatomy are expounded. The critical importance of scientific works and discoveries of Marie-François Xavier Bichat for modern science and practical medicine is emphasized

Editorial introductions

Editorial introductions

Franz Joseph Gall on hemispheric symmetries

ABSTRACT Franz Joseph Gall believed that the two cerebral hemispheres are anatomically and functionally similar, so much so that one could substitute for the other following unilateral injuries. He presented this belief during the 1790s in his early public lectures in Vienna, when traveling through Europe between 1805 and 1807, and in the two sets of books he published after settling in France. Gall seemed to derive his ideas about laterality independently of French anatomist Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), who formulated his “law of symmetry” at about the same time. He would, however, later cite Bichat, whose ideas about mental derangement were different from his own and who also attempted to explain handedness, a subject on which Gall remained silent. The concept of cerebral symmetry would be displaced by mounting clinical evidence for the hemispheres being functionally different, but neither Gall nor Bichat would live to witness the advent of the concept of cerebral dominance.

Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume? Revising the Popular Image of Frankenstein

This article critically examines the popular images of “Dr. Frankenstein” and his Creature, which took their iconic form in the 1931 film Frankenstein, influenced by medical experimentation following the Great War. Thus the title character is a medical student who stitches together stolen body parts to create a violent and subhuman monster, played to perfection by Boris Karloff. Because these images hardly resemble the original characters or plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the article presents a revised interpretation of that novel emphasizing its scientific context, particularly the theories of Erasmus Darwin and Xavier Bichat. Here Victor Frankenstein is a chemist inspired by alchemy, who applies an ingenious technique of spontaneous generation to grow tissues to form the body of a gigantic Creature. Its appearance is terrifying because it is a new species, uncannily similar to but also superior to a human being, and thus it threatens to replace humanity.

The historical origins of the vegetative state: Received wisdom and the utility of the text

ABSTRACTThe persistent vegetative state (PVS) is one of the most iconic and misunderstood phrases in clinical neuroscience. Coined as a diagnostic category by Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and American neurologist Fred Plum in 1972, the phrase “vegetative” first appeared in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul (circa mid-fourth century BCE). Aristotle influenced neuroscientists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Xavier Bichat and Walter Timme, and informed their conceptions of the vegetative nervous system. Plum credits Bichat and Timme in his use of the phrase, thus putting the ancient and modern in dialogue. In addition to exploring Aristotle’s definition of the “vegetative” in the original Greek, we put Aristotle in conversation with his contemporaries—Plato and the Hippocratics—to better apprehend theories of mind and consciousness in antiquity. Utilizing the discipline of reception studies in classics scholarship, we demonstrate the importance of etymology and historical origin when considering modern medical nosology.

Qu’apporte le « psychisch-somatisch » de Heinroth à la métapsychologie freudienne ?

Le concept de psychosomatique est attribue a un psychiatre allemand, Heinroth. Dans les periodiques et les chapitres d’ouvrages francophones, il apparait des meconnaissances que notre article tente de lever : meconnaissance sur le milieu theorique d’ou survient le concept, meconnaissance sur les debats qui ont preside a la naissance de ce concept, et meconnaissance des debats theoriques que cette idee a provoquee dans tout le xixe siecle allemand (notamment avec l’idee de somato-psychique). En exhumant ces meconnaissances et en appui d’une traduction serieuse, nous replacons l’idee de Heinroth au centre de ces debats et suivons un fil rouge, vitaliste, qui ouvre une nouvelle perspective aux precautions rhetoriques prises par Freud, en raison de ces debats contradictoires anterieurs, dans son modele freudien des pulsions. Ainsi, le debat ouvert par Heinroth a pu rester moderne et contemporain. En outre, notre traduction proposee du chapitre d’ouvrage en langue allemande revele que l’idee de la psychosomatique, originellement, s’articule avec l’insomnie maniaque.[resume d’auteur]

The ‘vegetative part’: Organic and plant life in The Walking Dead

Abstract The ‘zombie gaze’ of AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–) signals and elicits the inexorable presence of the ‘vegetative part’ in the human – the uncontrolled organic life that unsettles the very notion of the ‘person’ as well as those political systems founded upon it. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s Third Person (2012) and late eighteenth-century physiologist Xavier Bichat, both of whom argue that humans have a ‘double life’ – our voluntary will inextricably embedded in an involuntary ‘vegetative part’ – I argue that the characters of Shane Walsh and Merle Dixon exemplify the ‘organic’ life, the automaticity of the biological. But while Esposito and Bichat use ‘vegetative’ metaphorically, in Season 4, The Walking Dead begins to explore the more literal ‘vegetal life’ of and surrounding the human, suggesting humans’ proximity not just to the ‘guts’ that mark the presence of the organic but also to plants that signal the ‘vegetative part’. The series thus asks what it might mean, in the words of philosopher Michael Marder, to think of ‘the constitutive vegetal otherness in ourselves’.

Triangular blocks and wind tunnels: Augustin Rey's logic of air resistance

How does air shape our cities? How does air become a factor in urban design? In a session before the 1906 International Congress for Sanitary Dwellings, Adolphe Augustin Rey famously compared cities to vast bodies ‘furrowed by canals of air’. Rey (1864–1934), a Beaux-Arts-trained architect who would count Le Corbusier among his devotees, was then highlightinging his best-known project: the winning entry for the Fondation Rothschild's workers' housing competition in Paris. Conceived between 1905 and 1909, Rey's entry was a redesign of a triangular block formed by the Rue de Prague, Rue Charles Baudelaire, and Rue Theophile Roussel. Rey's design featured innovative open-air courtyards and perforated façades that would not only filter and cleanse the air inside the building, but would also contribute to healthier air in the city.This paper examines Rey's winning design from a different context: the burgeoning aeronautical culture in turn-of-the-century France. The focus will be on his drawings, with their depiction of buildings as white solids and of the dominant winds as dark lines of moving air with variable pressures: in short, architecture placed inside a wind tunnel. I argue that Rey's designs for the Rothschild competition provided an aerodynamic solution to urban block design. Rey's name is not usually associated with aeronautics, and yet the fact that his drawings look like wind tunnel visualisations is no mere coincidence. Here, the operative logic is that of resistance. Much like the French physiologist Xavier Bichat understood life as a product of ‘resistance’ against pathogens, Rey's designs show architecture as a product of air resistance. In the end, this paper proposes how one of the most fundamental aspects of twentieth-century urbanism, the design of the city block, can be viewed in the light of advances in aeronautics at the turn of the century.

The inverse law of habit: Psychology of passions and emotions

The beginning of the 19th century, especially in France, is marked by a focus on the philosophical investigation of habit. A classic work is Influence de l?habitude sur la facult? de penser by Pierre Maine de Biran. This had been instigated by the physiological research of Marie Fran?ois Xavier Bichat, who stated the inverse law of habit: feeling (sentiment) is blunted by habit, whereas judgment owes to it its perfection. So the question is whether the inverse law implies that habituation has a negative influence on emotions, that it blunts them. In the paper I argue that the answer is negative if Maine de Biran?s version of the inverse law of habit is taken in the context of perceptual view of emotions. According to Maine de Biran sensation is blunted by habit, while perception is perfected. If emotion is a kind of perception of bodily reactions, then although due to habit there is a decrease of these reactions, the perception of them will in turn be sharpened. If we note that the general law behind the inverse law of habit is that there is an inverse ratio between passive and active experiences, then we may conclude that habit blunts passions, and perfects emotions.

The birth of the clinicopathological method in France: the rise of morbid anatomy in France during the first half of the nineteenth century

Morbid anatomy underwent extraordinary development in Paris during the last years of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, for both philosophical and political reasons. The protagonists of this progress were primarily clinicians whose purpose was to link symptoms with pathological lesions and to elaborate a pertinent nosology. Pierre-Joseph Desault and Jean-Nicolas Corvisart were the forerunners, along with Xavier Bichat, a genius who died before he was able to realize his full potential. Guillaume Dupuytren, a renowned surgeon, founded an Anatomical Society with enthusiastic students; while Gaspard-Laurent Bayle and René-Theophile Laennec studied tuberculosis and developed the principles of clinicopathological correlations. Laennec's invention of the stethoscope in 1816 constituted a dramatic improvement of the possibilities of clinical examination and effectively established the clinicopathological method. A chair of morbid anatomy was created in 1835 for J. Cruveilhier, while a museum of morbid anatomy was established thanks to a 200,000 francs donation on behalf of G. Dupuytren. The French practitioners, however, did not believe that the microscope would play a major part in further medical progress, and after the revolution of 1848, the so-called School of Paris declined.

Tissue

Tissue derives from the Latin texere, “to weave”. Long used to describe a fabric of interwoven material, tissue gained currency in medical circles around 1800, when the French anatomist Marie-François Xavier Bichat applied it to the common structural elements shared by organs and systems. To order the bodily interior Bichat classified 21 types of tissue, each with a distinct function, and tried to understand diseases as lesions of these regions (for example, pericarditis). Tissues then became the subject of a new “general anatomy”, which was renamed histology in 1819. From the 1830s, tissues were no longer understood as the basic substance of the body; thanks to improvements in microscopy, they were now perceived as congeries of their component cells.New clinical and scientific techniques transformed tissue in the early 20th century: from an inert object of analysis to a valuable clinical resource and a dynamic experimental system. As part of increasing tissue grafting procedures, tissue such as skin was taken from human beings and animals, and grafted onto patients who had been scarred by burns, or injured in industrial accidents. In controversial procedures, sections from reproductive glands were also grafted to “revive” elderly and rich patients. At the same time, the development of tissue-culture techniques, from 1907, allowed scientists to directly manipulate tissues in vitro. This development gathered pace after World War II, when technical improvements and the use of antibiotics allowed tissues to survive longer in culture. They now became the sites of production for vaccines for polio, rabies, and rubella.Transatlantic changes in patent law in the 1980s gave tissues unprecedented economic importance as patentable commodities. Yet this shift clashed with a growing legal and philosophical emphasis on patients' autonomy, which, in turn, refigured tissues into contested objects in an emergent bioethics. These new and conflicted meanings were evident in disputes about the acquisition and ownership of tissues—such as the US case Moore vs The Regents of the University of California (1984–1990) and the UK Bristol Royal Infirmary and Alder Hey scandals (1999–2001). The latter two cases led to the passage, in the UK, of the 2004 Human Tissue Act, which makes patients' consent a fundamental principle for the medical storage and use of tissues. Tissue derives from the Latin texere, “to weave”. Long used to describe a fabric of interwoven material, tissue gained currency in medical circles around 1800, when the French anatomist Marie-François Xavier Bichat applied it to the common structural elements shared by organs and systems. To order the bodily interior Bichat classified 21 types of tissue, each with a distinct function, and tried to understand diseases as lesions of these regions (for example, pericarditis). Tissues then became the subject of a new “general anatomy”, which was renamed histology in 1819. From the 1830s, tissues were no longer understood as the basic substance of the body; thanks to improvements in microscopy, they were now perceived as congeries of their component cells. New clinical and scientific techniques transformed tissue in the early 20th century: from an inert object of analysis to a valuable clinical resource and a dynamic experimental system. As part of increasing tissue grafting procedures, tissue such as skin was taken from human beings and animals, and grafted onto patients who had been scarred by burns, or injured in industrial accidents. In controversial procedures, sections from reproductive glands were also grafted to “revive” elderly and rich patients. At the same time, the development of tissue-culture techniques, from 1907, allowed scientists to directly manipulate tissues in vitro. This development gathered pace after World War II, when technical improvements and the use of antibiotics allowed tissues to survive longer in culture. They now became the sites of production for vaccines for polio, rabies, and rubella. Transatlantic changes in patent law in the 1980s gave tissues unprecedented economic importance as patentable commodities. Yet this shift clashed with a growing legal and philosophical emphasis on patients' autonomy, which, in turn, refigured tissues into contested objects in an emergent bioethics. These new and conflicted meanings were evident in disputes about the acquisition and ownership of tissues—such as the US case Moore vs The Regents of the University of California (1984–1990) and the UK Bristol Royal Infirmary and Alder Hey scandals (1999–2001). The latter two cases led to the passage, in the UK, of the 2004 Human Tissue Act, which makes patients' consent a fundamental principle for the medical storage and use of tissues.

Joyce After Flaubert: The Cuckold as Imperfect Physician, the Writer as Physiologist

Although Joyce was not as familiar with the practice and theory of medicine as was Gustave Flaubert, this article argues that, through Flaubert's legacy, Joyce's writing was influenced by the French school of medical thought. Several aspects of Flaubert's style and narration-what has been dubbed his "medical realism"-were taken up by Joyce: the artist's impersonal perspective, the precision of descriptions, and the materialist attack against Romanticism, as well as the irony built into the narrative voice through free indirect discourse. While the cuckold in Madame Bovary is an incompetent surgeon serving as foil to the precise description of sentiments offered by the narrator, Joyce's cuckold in Ulysses is an amateur physiologist, both perspicacious and sympathetic to human suffering. Bloom's interest in internal bodily processes opens up new dimensions for a modernist aesthetics as he relates physiology and psychology, in accordance with the theories of Xavier Bichat, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis. In keeping with such focus, Joyce's physiological version of stream-of-consciousness stems from Flaubert's clinical description of characters, but he directs matters even further inward.

Marie-François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) and his contributions to the foundations of pathological anatomy and modern medicine

Marie-François Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) was a prominent French anatomist during a time of revolution and one of the founders of French scientific medicine. He conducted several experimental studies, which laid the foundation for modern physiology. Based on autopsy findings, Bichat introduced 21 tissues as the basic elements of organs. His name is carried on by several eponyms in anatomy and histology; Bichat's fossa (pterygopalatine fossa), Bichat's protuberance (buccal fat pad), Bichat's foramen (cistern of the vena magna of Galen), Bichat's ligament (lower fasciculus of the posterior sacroiliac ligament), Bichat's fissure (transverse fissure of the brain) and Bichat's tunic (tunica intima vasorum). This paper deals with the life and works of this early pioneer in anatomy and physiology.

Romantic theory: forms of reflexivity in the revolutionary era

This original study explores the new idea of theory that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Leon Chai sees in the Romantic age a significant movement across several broad fields of intellectual endeavor, from theoretical concepts to an attempt to understand how they arise. He contends that this movement led to a spatial treatment of concepts, the primacy of development over concepts, and the creation of metatheory, or the formal analysis of theory. Chai begins with P. B. Shelley on the need for conceptual framework, or theory. He then considers how Friedrich Wolf and Friedrich Schlegel shift from a preoccupation with antiquity to a heightened self-awareness of Romantic nostalgia for that lost past. He finds a similar reflexivity in Napoleon's battle plan at Jena and, subsequently, in Hegel's move from substance to subject. Chai then turns to the sciences: Xavier Bichat's rejection of the idea of a unitary vital principle for life as process; the chemical theory of matter developed by Humphry Davy; and the work of Evariste Galois, whose proof of the solvability of equations using radicals ushered in the age of metatheory. Chai concludes with reactions to theory: Coleridge's proposal of the conflict between reason and understanding as a model of theory, Mary Shelley's effort to replace theory with a different kind of relationship to external others, and Holderlin's reflection on the limits of representation and the possibility of fulfillment beyond it.