Death, Life, and Urban Planning — Marie François Xavier Bichat
Marie François Xavier Bichat revolutionized the practice of medicine through careful study of the tissues that make up the human body. Bichat trained as a surgeon, and he practiced at the famed hospital Hotel Dieu in Paris at the end of the 18th century. But, his passion was the diagnosis of disease. Up until Bichat’s work, doctors understood disease only through the symptoms that they could observe at the bedside of a patient. Bichat challenged his colleagues to go further saying, “You may take notes for twenty years from morning to night at the bedside of the sick, and all will be a confusion of symptoms… but open up a few corpses and the confusion will soon disappear.” He believed that more could be learned by studying the changes that diseases cause in the body’s tissues. Bichat was as good as his word — in one year he conducted 600 autopsies. Unfortunately, Bichat died in 1802 at age 30 probably from his work with diseased tissues.
Bichat’s work had influence far beyond the bounds of medicine, and even of science. In the first decades of the 19th century, science was dominated by the advances in chemistry, astronomy, and physics — building on the success of Isaac Newton’s laws on gravity and mechanics. Bichat was adamant in his insistence that living organisms are governed by an additional “vital force” that lies outside of the laws of chemistry and physics. Bichat may not have had this quite right — a point that would be debated long after his death — but his claim encouraged others to define biology as an independent area of study. Further, Bichat’s theory of disease was based on a model for the organization of the human body that provided a useful metaphor for other areas of study. Tissues form the basic elements; organs are constructed of tissues; systems, like the digestive system, are constructed of organs; and the body constitutes the total of these elements and is sustained by their mutually-supporting functions. This influenced Cuvier in his work to organize species of animals into the tree of life.
Bichat’s ideas also proved useful in helping to understand how individuals are organized into communities, towns, cities and nations. The French Revolution launched a experiment in democratic government in the heart of Europe by rejecting outright the divine right of the monarch as the chief organizing principle for national government, and people were searching for ways to understand the results of this experiment as they unfolded in the political and social upheaval that dominated life in France for most of the 19th century. Sociologists and political scientists trace the earliest concepts in these fields of study back to Bichat’s model of the human body. When Baron von Haussmann and Eugene Belgrand launched the project to modernize Paris in the 1860s, they invoked the vision of Paris as a living organism, rather than as a machine.
Xavier Bichat is one of the 72 scientists and engineers named on the Eiffel Tower.
