Overview

Long before the development of cell theory, philosophers and anatomists speculated about the nature of constituents of the human body that might exist below the level of ordinary vision. Even after the introduction of the microscope in the seventeenth century, however, investigators still argued about the level of resolution that might be applicable to studies of the human body. By the eighteenth century, many anatomists had abandoned humoral pathology and, in analyzing the structure and function of organs and organ systems, hoped to discover correlations between localized lesions and the process of disease. Tissue doctrine was elaborated by the great French anatomist Marie-François-Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) as an answer to the question about the constituents of the body. As a result of Bichat's ingenious approach to the...