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4th. An impression made on one part of the sympathetic system is easily communicated to another, and to the ganglionic masses of the visceral plexuses, already described. Hence the rapid effect of many emotions upon the processes of digestion; hence the epigastric response to the emotion of fear, which led Bichat to localize this feeling in the solar plexus lying behind the stomach.
Since diseases are only alterations of vital properties, and the properties of each tissue are distinct from those of the rest, it is evident that the diseases of each tissue must be different from those of the rest. In a spirit of true prophecy, Bichat says, "We have arrived at an epoch in which pathological anatomy should start afresh."
And the conception wrought out by Bichat, with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim, oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments.
All that method could do had been accomplished by Bichat and his followers. It was for the optician to take the next step. The future of anatomy and physiology, as an enthusiastic micrologist of the time said, was in the hands of Messrs. Schieck and Pistor, famous opticians of Berlin. In those earlier days of which I am speaking, all the points of minute anatomy were involved in obscurity.
His celebrated definition may be quoted: "La vie est l'ensemble des proprietes vitales qui resistent aux proprietes physiques, ou bien la vie est l'ensemble des fonctions qui resistent a la mort." His meteoric career ended in his thirty-first year: he died a victim of a post-mortem wound infection. At his death, Corvisart wrote Napoleon: "Bichat has just died at the age of thirty.
The definitions themselves will best illustrate our meaning. I will begin with that given by Bichat. “Life is the sum of all the functions by which death is resisted,” in which I have in vain endeavoured to discover any other meaning than that life consists in being able to live.
Far more important, however, was another classification which Bichat put forward in his work on anatomy, published just at the beginning of the last century. This was the division of all animal structures into what Bichat called tissues, and the pointing out that there are really only a few kinds of these in the body, making up all the diverse organs.
Bichat, the great anatomist and physiologist, who died near the beginning of this century, published his treatise, which made a revolution in anatomy and pathology, at about the same age; dying soon after he had reached the age of thirty. So, possibly the Counsellor may find that he has "stirred up" a young man who, can take care of his own head, in case of aggressive movements in its direction.
There is little to see in the Church of Brou besides these mausoleums, and nothing in Bourg itself, except the fine bronze statue to Bichat, by David d'Angers. The great anatomist is represented in the act of oscultation, the patient being a child, standing between his knees.
But the great triumph of the microscope as applied to anatomy has been in the resolution of the organs and the tissues into their simple constituent anatomical elements. It has taken up general anatomy where Bichat left it. He had succeeded in reducing the structural language of nature to syllables, if you will permit me to use so bold an image.
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