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As the great anatomist Bichat long ago said, if every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.
This subject of these branches completely fascinated Bichat, and he exclaimed, enthusiastically: "Take away some fevers and nervous trouble, and all else belongs to the kingdom of pathological anatomy." But out of this enthusiasm came great results.
"All animals," says he, "are assemblages of different organs, each of which performs its function and concurs, after its fashion, in the preservation of the whole. They are so many special machines in the general machine which constitutes the individual. And Bichat proceeds to make the obvious application of this doctrine of synthetic life, if I may so call it, to pathology.
The extraordinary genius of Bichat, to whom more than any other we owe this new method of study, does not require Mr. Buckle's testimony to impress the practitioner with the importance of its achievements. I have heard a very wise physician question whether any important result had accrued to practical medicine from Harvey's discovery of the circulation.
But the fool has never lived; life, said Bichat, is the totality of the functions; his past has endured no more organization than his future has; he never understood it; he can make no use of it; so he deifies it, and burns the flying moment like a joss-stick before the wooden image in which he has caricatured all its sweet and beneficent capabilities; as if it were likely that one moment of his existence could be of any more weight than another.
Bichat had a personal acquaintance whose hair became almost entirely gray in consequence of some distressing news that reached him. Cassan records a similar case.
Hence the sum-total of our Volitions and our Ideas constitutes Action, and the sum-total of our external acts he called Reaction. When I subsequently read the observations made by Bichat on the duality of our external senses, I was really bewildered by my recollections, recognizing the startling coincidences between the views of that celebrated physiologist and those of Louis Lambert.
Subsequent advances were to show that the distinction between the various tissues is not really so fundamental as Bichat supposed, but that takes nothing from the practical value of the famous classification.
Nevertheless, Bichat rendered a solid service to physiological progress by insisting upon the fact that what we call life, in one of the higher animals, is not an indivisible unitary archaeus dominating, from its central seat, the parts of the organism, but a compound result of the synthesis of the separate lives of those parts.
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.
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