BRISSET, PIERRE, a very celebrated French physician, born at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Poitou, in 1478. After taking his doctor's degree at Paris, he 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 a knowledge of plants; and going to Portugal, he practised physic in the city of Evora. His new method of bleeding in pleurises, on the side where the pleurisy was situated, occasioned a memorable controversy among the Portuguese physicians, and was brought before the university of Salamanca, which at last gave judgment, that the opinion maintained by Brisset was the pure doctrine of Galen. The partisans of Denis, his opponent, appealed in 1629 to the emperor, to prevent the practice, as being fraught with dangerous consequences; but in consequence of the death of the eldest son of Charles III. duke of Savoy, from a pleurisy at this very time, after having been bled on the opposite side, the prosecution dropped. Brisset died at Lisbon in 1622. He wrote an apology for his practice, which was published at Paris, in 1500, in 1525, by his friend Antonio Luceas. Renatus Moreau printed a new edition at Paris in 1622, and annexed to it a treatise entitled De Sanguinis Missione in Pleurite, together with a life of Brisset.