Jacob B. Winslow

Jacob B. Winsløw, also known as Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, Danish-born anatomist (born 1669, Odense, died 1760, Paris).

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Winsløw was born in Denmark, later he became a pupil and successor of Guichard Joseph Duverney, as well as a convert to Catholicism, naturalized in France, and finally became professor of anatomy at the Jardin du Roi in Paris.

Winsløw greatly admired Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the famous preacher, and, as a consequence, he slightly changed his Danish Christian names to those of Bossuet.

His exposition of the structure of the human body is distinguished for being not only the first treatise of descriptive anatomy, divested of physiological details and hypothetical explanations foreign to the subject, but for being a close description derived from actual objects, without reference to the writings of previous anatomists. About the same time William Cheselden in London, the first Alexander Monro in Edinburgh, and Bernhard Siegfried Albinus in Leiden, contributed by their several treatises to render anatomy still more precise as a descriptive science. The Osteographia of the first-mentioned was of much use in directing attention to the study of the skeleton and the morbid changes to which it is liable.