Xavier Bichat
French anatomist and pathologist
- Lived
- 1771–1802
Updated September 2026
Free to read
All free classicsGeneral Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 1 (of 3)
General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 2 (of 3)
General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 3 (of 3)
Physiological Researches on Life and Death
Treatise on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Mucous Membranes
About Xavier Bichat
Marie François Xavier Bichat was a French anatomist and pathologist, known as the father of modern histology. Although he worked without a microscope, Bichat distinguished 21 types of elementary tissues from which the organs of the human body are composed. He was also "the first to propose that tissue is a central element in human anatomy, and he considered organs as collections of often disparate tissues, rather than as entities in themselves". The buccal fat pad was named after him.
Biography from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers, free texts from Project Gutenberg. Last updated September 2026.