Francois Bichat, born in 1771, earned high rank both as a clinician and an anatomist. His education was begun in Nantes, but he studied surgery and anatomy in Lyons and Montpellier, subsequently going to Paris, where he became a member of Desault's family. After the death of his patron he lectured on surgery, and from 1797 on anatomy. Possessed of a feverish scientific activity, he became a member of the Société d'Emulation. Death overtook him in 1802 as the sequel of consumption and an injury received through a fall. He was the most capable physician of France in his time, and, brief as w>as his span of life, he was author of nine important volumes, the chief of which were a _Treatise on Membranes_ and works on general and pathological anatomy. From the latter a new tendency in study took origin. He it was who gave utterance to the aphorism: "Take away some fevers and nervous troubles, and all else falls to the kingdom of pathological anatomy." As an evidence of his energy, it is related that he in one winter examined seven hundred bodies. He taught how to discriminate between disease processes, and notably subdivided peripneumonia into pleurisy, pneumonia, and bronchitis, these having been previously confounded. He once remarked: "You may observe disease of the heart, lungs, abdominal viscera, etc., night and morning by the sick-bed for twenty years, yet the whole furnishes merely a jumble of phenomena which unite in nothing complete; but if you open a few bodies, you will see the obscurity speedily give way,--a result never accomplished by observation if we do not know the seat of the disease." To Bichat is also due our modern recognition of cellular,{209} osseous, fibrous, and other tissues, as such, wherever they appear throughout the body. He differentiated, without the aid of the microscope, twenty-one different tissues as simple and similar elements of the body, enumerating them as one does the chemical elements; he described the stomach as composed of mucous, serous, and muscular layers; overthrew the speculative tendency of medicine, and placed facts in the front rank; and so conspicuous were his services that he has been termed the "Napoleon of Medicine." He supplemented the influence of Pinel upon the side of pathological anatomy; called sensibility and contractility vital properties, whose alterations constitute disease, claiming, however, that the vital properties of individual tissues differed among themselves. His life and works are revelations to young men and show what can be accomplished at a very early age{210} by sufficiently active and harmoniously developed brains.