Brous's ais, Fran

ÇOIS JOSEPH VICTOR, a celebrated French physician, B. at St. Malo, 1772. Profe or at the military hospital of Val de Grâce in 1820, he became profe or of general pathology in the faculty of medicine in Paris, 1832, and afterwards was made a member of the Institute. The influence of B. in his generation was unbounded, and his so-called Physiological Doctrine rapidly acquired a great sway, the traces of which are visible even now, though a more exact knowledge of physiology has demonstrated that the views of B. were one-sided and exaggerated. He announced himself as the founder of a pathology which, for the first time in the history of pathologies, was based upon an enlarged and comprehensive acquaintance with anatomy. The basis of B.'s doctrine was the a umption that the animal ti ues are endowed with a property called irritability, a property which is called into play by the action of stimuli of various kinds, and by the operation of which all vital phenomena are produced. D. 1838.