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The new science of Histology, as it is now called, was first brought fully before the profession of this country by the translation of Bichat's great work, "Anatomie Generale," by the late Dr. George Hayward.
The gardens of the hospital are adorned by a bust of the great anatomist, Bichat, whose birth-place, like that of Homer, is disputed. Bourg-en-Bresse disputes the honour with Lons-le-Saunier, and Bourg possesses the splendid monument to Bichat's memory by David d'Angers.
It had never been given explicit expression before the time of Bichat, though it is said that Bichat himself was somewhat indebted for it to his master, Desault, and to the famous alienist Pinel. However that may be, it is certain that all subsequent anatomists have found Bichat's classification of the tissues of the utmost value in their studies of the animal functions.
The new science of Histology, as it is now called, was first brought fully before the profession of this country by the translation of Bichat's great work, "Anatomie Generale," by the late Dr. George Hayward.
Bichat's volumes, telling of the recognition of the fundamental tissues of the body, did not begin to appear till the last year of the century. The announcement by Cuvier of the doctrine of correlation of parts bears the same date, but in general the studies of this great naturalist, which in due time were to stamp him as the successor of Linnaeus, were as yet only fairly begun.
It is a monument alike worthy of the artist and his subject, another instance of that dignified realism for which David d'Angers was so remarkable. There is, however, some doubt as to Bichat's birth-place; Lons-le-Saunier, as I have before mentioned, contesting the honour with Bourg. On the principle that two monuments to a great man are better than none at all, each place claims the honour.
Their sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation; so they begin to deny truths that have long been admitted the vital power, for example, the sympathetic nervous system, generatio equivoca, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions and the working of intelligence; or else they want us to return to crass atomism, and the like.
The division thus pointed out was not quite new, for Grimaud, professor of physiology in the University of Montpellier, had earlier made what was substantially the same classification of the functions into "internal or digestive and external or locomotive"; but it was Bichat's exposition that gave currency to the idea.
It corresponds very nearly to Bichat's definition that, "life is organization in action." The finer sense of Shakspeare dictated a truer definition than the science of the French physiologist, "What's yet in this That bears the name of life? Yet in this life Lie hid more thousand deaths." Measure for Measure, Act iii. Scene 1. No physical or psychical act is possible without this change.
But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's.
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