532 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ing of the day before Christmas, 1776, and his old enemy, Bouvart, who 

 seems to have always kept him in mind for judicial hanging, vented his 

 glee in an epigram which, for venom, matches up with what Louis XIV 

 said as the cortege of la Montespan passed by in the driving sleet: Je 

 n'aurais pas cru quil fut mort horizontalement ! " 



At the present time, the scientific reputation of Bordeu is of the 

 slenderest kind. He is one of the gods of the old Montpellier faculty. 

 In his relation to the fashionable mineral springs of the Pyrenees — 

 Pau, Bareges, Bagneres — he seems the original, indeed, the archetypal 

 Badearzt. He was a good anatomist, a piquant writer on medical his- 

 tory, a promoter of variolation. His view of the brain, the heart and 

 the stomach as " the tripod of life " made its fortune in its day, and he 

 achieved a great reputation by his revival of the complex pulse-lore or 

 ars sphygmica of Galen and the Chinese physicians, a phase of eighteenth 

 century medicine which Dr. Weir Mitchell pithily described as "ob- 

 servation gone minutely mad." In the history of medicine these dis- 

 tinctions count for very little. Bordeu, who died on the eve of the 

 Eevolution, was doubtless one of the giants before the flood, but, as 

 compared with the great names of those who came apres le deluge — 

 Bichat, Louis, Laennec, Bretonneau, Andral, Pinel, such clinical 

 " genius " as he had acquires the ghostly implication conveyed in the 

 original meaning of the term. It has been said that every physician of 

 florid or fashionable reputation has in him something of the charlatan, 

 and there are anecdotes about Bordeu which show that he was no excep- 

 tion to the rule. But there are one or two things which make him an 

 important connecting link between the outmoded, pompous, pedantic 

 French medicine of the old regime and the brilliant and truly scientific 

 output of the Napoleonic period and after. Bordeu appears to have 

 been the first anatomist to employ the term " tissue," and his " Ke- 

 cherches sur le tissu muqueux ou l'organe cellulaire" (1767) imme- 

 diately suggest the great Bichat, whom he influenced, it is true, but in 

 a most untoward way. By tissu muqueux, which he also calls l'organe 

 cellulaire, Bordeu means neither cellular structures as Schleiden and 

 Schwann saw them nor protoplasm as Purkinje and Schultze saw it, but 

 simply such vague protoplasmic configurations as were visible through a 

 lower-power microscope. It was his ambition to confirm and uphold 

 the humoral pathology of Hippocrates, and he regarded the three Hip- 

 pocratic stages of disease, irritation, coction and crisis, as dependent 

 upon the glandular and other secretions. Corresponding with the dif- 

 ferent organs and secretions, he classified diseases, not according to their 

 clinical or pathological manifestations, but arbitrarily as cachexias, of 

 which he devised a prodigious list, e, g., bilious, mucous, albuminous, 

 fatty, splenic, seminal, urinary, stercoral, perspiratory; with an equally 

 complex classification of the pulse as critical, non-critical, nasal, tracheal, 



