BRISSOT, PETER, one of the ablest physicians of the sixteenth century, was born at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Poitou, in 1478. He studied at Paris, and, having taken his doctor's degree, bent his thoughts on reforming physic, by restoring the precepts of Hippocrates and Galen, and exploding the maxims of the Arabians; for which purpose he publicly explained Galen's works, instead of those of Avicenna, Rhazes, and Mesvé. He afterwards resolved to travel to acquire the knowledge of plants; and going to Portugal, he practised physic in the city of Evora. His new method of bleeding in pleurisy, on the side where the pleurisy was situated, raised a kind of civil war among the Portuguese physicians, and was brought before the university of Salamanca, which at last gave judgment, that the opinion ascribed to Brissot was the pure doctrine of Galen. The partisans of Denis, his opponent, appealed in 1529 to the emperor, to prevent the practice, as being attended with destructive consequences; but Charles III. duke of Savoy happening to die at this time of a pleurisy, after having been bled on the opposite side, the prosecution dropped. He wrote an Apology for his practice, but died before it was published, in 1552, by his friend Anthony Luceus. Renatus Moreau printed a new edition at Paris in 1622, and annexed to it a treatise entitled
Brissot. De Sanguinis Missione in Pleuritide, together with a life of Brissot.