Scientists who engaged in tissue discovery

Providing a history of Tissue, it is inevitable to return to the basics, starting in 1665, when
Hooke (1635-1703) discovered small holes in cross-sections, which he called cells and described
in his book Micrographia. In 1805, Oken stated, "All life is based on individual cells."
Marie François Xavier Bichat (November 14, 1771 – July 22, 1802) was a French anatomist and
physiologist who is best remembered as the father of modern histology and descriptive
anatomy.Despite working without a microscope, he was the first to introduce the notion of
tissues as distinct entities, and maintained that diseases attacked tissues rather than whole
organs .

Robert Hooke
The Englishman Robert Hooke (18th July 1635 - 3rd March 1703) was an architect, natural
philosopher and brilliant scientist, best known for his law of elasticity (Hooke's law), his book
Micrographia, published in 1665 and for first applying the word "cell" to describe the basic unit
of life. It is also less well known that there is substantial evidence that Hooke developed the
spring watch escapement, independently of and some fifteen years before Huygens, who is
credited for this invention. Hooke also is recognised for his work on gravity, and his work as an
architect and surveyor.
Perhaps his most famous observations were in his study of thin slices of cork, describing the
pores, or "cells" he viewed. Hooke had discovered plant cells, or more precisely, Hooke had been
viewing the cell walls in cork tissue. In fact, it was Hooke who coined the term "cells": the
boxlike cells of cork reminded him of the cells of a monastery. Hooke also reported seeing
similar structures in wood and in other plants. Hooke also famously described a fly's eye.
The extract below from Micrographia demonstrates Hooke's perspective on how the microscope
is utilised to enhance the senses...

Lorenz Oken
German natur-philosopher and microscopist, Lorenz Oken had been trained in medicine at
Freiburg University. He went on to become a renown philosopher and thinker of the 19th
century. It is reported that in 1805 Oken stated that "All living organisms originate from and
consist of cells"... which may have been the first statement of a cell theory.
It is upon the works of Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Oken, and Brown that Schleiden and Schwann
built their Cell Theory. It was the German professor of botany at the University of Jena, Dr. M.
J. Schleiden, who brought the nucleus to popular attention, and to asserted its all-importance in
the function of a cell. Schleiden freely acknowledged his indebtedness to Brown for first
knowledge of the nucleus, but he soon carried out his own observations of the nucleus, far
beyond those of Brown. He came to believe that the nucleus is really the most important portion
of the cell, in that it is the original structure from which the remainder of the cell is developed.
He called it the cytoblast. He outlined his views in an epochal paper published in Muller's
Archives in 1838, under title of "Beitrage zur Phytogenesis." This paper is in itself of value, yet
the most important outgrowth of Schleiden's observations of the nucleus did not spring from his
own labors, but from those of a friend to whom he mentioned his discoveries the year previous
to their publication. This friend was Dr. Theodor Schwann, professor of physiology in the
University of Louvain.

Marie François Xavier Bichat

Marie-François-Xavier Bichat, (born Nov. 11/14, 1771, Thoirette, France—died July 22,
1802, Lyon), French anatomist and physiologist whose systematic study of
human tissues helped found the science of histology.
Bichat studied anatomy and surgery under Marc-Antoine Petit, chief surgeon at the Hôtel
Dieu in Lyon. In 1793 he became a pupil, then assistant, of Pierre-Joseph Desault, surgeon and
anatomist in Paris. After his teacher’s death in 1795, Bichat completed the fourth volume of
Desault’s Journal de chirurgie,adding a biographical memoir of its author.
In addition to his observations at the bedsides of patients at the Hôtel Dieu, Bichat studied the
postmortem changes induced in various organs by disease. Without knowledge of the cell as the
functional unit of living things, he was among the first to visualize the organs of the body as
being formed through the differentiation of simple, functional units, or tissues. This view he
developed in Traité des membranes (1800; “Treatise on Membranes”). Although Bichat did not
use the microscope, he distinguished 21 kinds of tissues that enter into different combinations in
forming the organs of the body. His Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800;
“Physiological Researches on Life and Death”) was followed by Anatomie générale (1801). He
published the first two volumes of Anatomie descriptive in 1801–03, and the third was
completed by his pupils after his death. By order of Napoleon his bust, along with that of
Desault, was placed in the Hôtel Dieu.
 Histology

Histology, the study of the finer structures of animals and plants with a microscope, started to
emerge as a distinct discipline within the biological and medical sciences during the early part of
the nineteenth century, although the study of tissues with the naked eye and magnifying glasses
can be traced back to Marcello Malpighi (1628 - 1694) who can rightly be regarded as the person
who founded microscopic anatomy. In his book Epistolae de pulmonibus of 1661, which he
dedicated to his mentor Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608 – 1679), Malphigi described the small
air sacks (alveoli) of lungs and the network of minute blood vessels which join the arteries to the
veins (anastomoses, capillaries). (Borelli founded the ‘Iatromechanic School’ who chose to
explain the workings of the animal body purely on mechanical grounds, and attributed all
physiological and pathological phenomena to the laws of physics).
Duke Frederico Cesi (1585 – 1630), who founded the Accademia dei Lincei in 1603, teased out
the tissues of the bees he was so fond of before taking a closer look at their structure with his
microscope. His fellow Lycean Academy member Giovanni Battista Hodierna (1597 – 1660),
however, allowed the insects he was interested in to decompose before examining them with a
microscope; he could separate the eye of a fly into four separate layers.
This practice of teasing out or squashing flat the tissues to be examined meant that the
relationship of the various cells to one another was disturbed and that only low magnifications
were possible before the images became too blurred. In 1666 Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691)
reported that immersing tissues in ‘spirits of wine’ prevented post-mortem decay and thus
helped to preserve the natural state of the tissues. This immersion had an additional benefit: the
tissues had hardened sufficiently for thin sections to be cut with a sharp knife.

Formaldehyde (formalin), known to everybody, is a naturally occurring organic compound

which is equally good for the preservation and for the fixation of tissues. The solution was in
common use by the end of the nineteenth century having been discovered by ‘accident’ in 1865
by the Russian chemist Alexander Butlerov (1828 – 1886).

The idea of freezing the tissue was bandied around during the 1820s, but it was the experience
of Benedikt Stilling (1810 – 1879) that prompted the exploitation of this technique for
overcoming the fact that, with the exception of bone or cartilage, animal tissues were too soft for
fine sectioning. Arriving at work on 24 January 1842, Stilling found that he had by accident left
a piece of spinal cord on the windowsill of his laboratory the night before. On retrieving the
tissue, he found it was hard enough for him to cut a transverse section through it and, when he
looked at the cut surface with a magnifying glass, he saw nerve bundles. Later, when freeze-
drying became better known, there appeared on the market many devices (microtomes) of
various sizes and complexities that used either ice and salt, or the cooling effect of evaporating
ether or carbon dioxide, as freezing agents.