Marie Marguerite Bihéron
Medical illustrator (1719–1795)
Marie Marguerite Bihéron (17 November 1719 – 18 June 1795) (also known as Marie Catherine Bihéron) was a French anatomist, known for her medical illustrations and wax figure models.
Biography
Bihéron was the daughter of a French apothecary, born in 1719. She studied illustration at the Jardin du Roi and with Madeleine Basseporte, of whom little is known outside of her anatomical drawings, and the memoirs of contemporaries.
To procure bodies for her anatomical studies, Bihéron was forced to have them stolen from the military. Frustrated with their rapid putrefaction, and at the suggestion of Basseporte, Bihéron turned her skills towards anatomical wax modeling, becoming a leading and highly recognized practitioner of this art. The famous physician Villoisin and the scholar Jussieu were impressed, and both promoted her work. In 1759, Jean Morand invited her to present her work to the Academie Royale des Sciences. She was invited again in 1770, to demonstrate an innovative, very detailed and lifelike model of a pregnant woman, complete with moveable parts and fetuses. In 1771 she presented to the Academie Royale for the third time, this time presenting her models to the visiting crown prince of Sweden, Gustavus of Sweden.
Her models achieved international renown, both because of their great anatomical accuracy and lifelikeness, and because she apparently had a method of making wax models that did not melt.
The public source identifies “Marie Marguerite Bihéron” as medical illustrator (1719–1795). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Marie, Marguerite and Bihéron.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marie Marguerite Bihéron” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.