Felix Marchand

MARCHAND, Felix (1846–1928), an eminent German pathologist. He graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Berlin in 1870 and worked as a military physician until 1876. In 1876, he assumed the position of assistant at the Institute of Pathology in Halle, and in 1879 he moved to the position of senior assistant at the Institute of Pathology in Breslau under the leadership of the well-known Ponfick. In 1881, Marchand was elected professor of pathological anatomy in Giessen, in 1883 he transferred to a corresponding chair in Marburg, and in 1900, following the death of the famous Leipzig pathologist and anatomist Birch-Hirschfeld, he moved to Leipzig, where he held the position of professor and director of the Pathological-Anatomical Institute until 1921, when he retired due to length of service. In Leipzig, under Marchand's leadership, a new pathological institute was built and equipped (opened in 1906). From 1910 to 1921, Marchand served as president of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Leipzig Medical Society.

Marchand's scientific works (over 200) cover a wide variety of fields in parasitology, embryology, and especially pathology. He was the first to elucidate the pathological anatomy of cysticercus racemosus; in embryology, he provided several highly valuable descriptions of early human embryos as well as the development of decidual tissue and the placenta, alongside a series of works concerning the development and malformations of the corpus callosum of the brain. Regarding pathology and pathological anatomy, Marchand's scientific contributions are very significant, as he and his school were the first to elaborate and reveal the pathological anatomy of the late stages of acute yellow atrophy of the liver and its nodular hyperplasia, the significance of the islets of Langerhans of the pancreas in diabetes, the origin of granular corpuscles in the nervous system, the pathological anatomy of bronchial asthma, the nature of renal adenosarcomas, the nature of so-called chorionepitheliomas (he first proposed the term "chorionepithelioma" instead of the former "deciduoma"), and many others. However, Marchand's most important works pertain to arteriosclerosis, inflammation, and wound healing. He established the doctrine of atherosclerosis (the term atherosclerosis was introduced by Marchand), which rapidly gained almost universal recognition and retains its validity to the present day (see Arteriosclerosis). In the chapter on inflammation, Marchand, through his own work and that of his school, highlighted the immense importance in the inflammatory process of the participation of local cellular elements, which—in the form of leucocytoid cells (according to Marchand's terminology)—participate in the exudate and infiltrate even in the earliest periods of inflammation (see Wandering Cells); to study the participation of local cells in inflammation, Marchand and his school devised a technique of introducing porous foreign bodies into the abdominal cavity of experimental animals (subsequently combined with vital staining). These studies by Marchand's school introduced a very important correction into Cohnheim's doctrine of inflammation and established the histological and histogenetic picture of inflammation that is universally recognized today. Adjoining his works on inflammation are Marchand's studies on the processes of transplantation and wound healing, summarized by him in the 16th issue of Deutsche Chirurgie under the title "Prozess der Wundheilung" (Stuttgart, 1901). Together with L. Krehl, Marchand edited a large multi-author handbook on general pathology ("Handbuch der allgemeinen Pathologie", vols. I–IV, Leipzig, 1913–1925), in which Marchand himself wrote a number of chapters (thermal causes of diseases, animal parasites, circulatory disorders); in volume IV of this handbook, published in 1925, Marchand wrote an extensive (about 400-page) chapter, "Über örtliche reaktive Prozesse-Lehre von der Entzündung", which can be considered a classical exposition of the contemporary state of the doctrine of inflammation.

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