Illustration of the French anatomist and physiologist Marie-Francois Xavier Bichat (1771-1802). Bichat is best known as the founder of modern histology and descriptive anatomy. He noted that various organs consist of several components, or tissues, and set about documenting them. Eschewing the aid of a microscope, his observations were made during numerous post-mortems. His work had much influence on medical science, forming a link between the 'organ pathology' of Morgagni and the later 'cell pathology' of Virchow. Illustration from 1859.