Victor André Cornil

Victor André Cornil, also André-Victor Cornil (1837-1908) was a French pathologist who was a professor at the University of Paris. He received his doctorate in Paris in 1860, and was later a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine.

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Cornil was a renowned professor of pathological anatomy, and is also remembered for his work in the fields of bacteriology, histology and microscopic anatomy. In 1864, he was the first physician to describe chronic childhood arthritis. However, this disease was to become known as Still's disease after English physician George Frederic Still. In 1863 Cornil demonstrated histological evidence that supported Guillaume Duchenne's hypothesis regarding the cause of paralysis in poliomyelitis. Cornil and Austrian anatomist Richard Heschl (1824-1881} were the first physicians to discover the use of methyl violet as an histological stain for detection of amyloid.

In 1865 he founded a private laboratory with Louis-Antoine Ranvier where they gave courses in histology. Here, Cornil taught pathological anatomy and Ranvier taught standard anatomy. With Victor Babeş he wrote an important paper on bacterial infections titled Les bactéries et leur rôle dans l’anatomie et l’histologie pathologiques des maladies infectieuses.[1], and with Ranvier he published Manuel d'histologie pathologique, which was an influential manual of histopathology.