Henry Charlton Bastian

Portrait of Bastian published in The Popular Science Monthly in 1875

Henry Charlton Bastian (26 April 1837 in Truro, Cornwall, England – 17 November 1915 in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire) was an English physiologist and neurologist.

Biography

Bastian was born at Truro, Cornwall and graduated from University of London in 1861. He obtained his M.D. in 1866. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1868 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1870.

In 1867, Bastian was elected Professor of Pathology and Assistant Physician at UCL Medical School and successively became Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCL Medical School. In 1868, he became assistant physician to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, then full physician in 1887. He served at the National Hospital until he retired in 1912.

He was an advocate of the doctrine of archebiosis. He believed he witnessed the spontaneous generation of living organisms out of non living matter under his microscope.

Works

The Evolution of Life, 1907

• Monograph of the Anguillulidae (1865)
• The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms (1871)
• The Beginnings of Life: Being Some Account of the Nature, Modes of Origin and Transformation of Lower Organisms, I–II (1872)
• Evolution and the Origin of Life (1874)
• The Brain as an Organ of Mind (1880)
• The "muscular sense" its nature and cortical localisation (1887)
• A Treatise on Aphasia and Other Speech Defects (1898)
• The Nature and Origin of Living Matter (1905)
• The Evolution of Life (1907)
• The Origin of Life (1911)

See also

• Bastian-Bruns law or Bastian-Bruns sign
• Receptive aphasia

Further reading

• Strick, James. (1999). Darwinism and the Origin of Life: The Role of H. C. Bastian in the British Spontaneous Generation Debates, 1868-1873. Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1): 51-92.