Gaspard-Laurent Bayle

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Gaspard-Laurent Bayle

1774-1816

French physician who published a landmark treatise in 1810 describing the many clinical varieties of tuberculosis. In 1805 Bayle was appointed to the staff of the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris, where he recorded detailed histories of individual cases and conducted hundreds of autopsies. His Research on Pulmonary Tuberculosis (1810) described the tubercle, the characteristic starting point of the lesions of phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis). Bayle suggested that tuberculosis was the result of some general defect, which he called the "tuberculous diathesis." He was the first to use the term "miliary" to describe a widely disseminated form of tuberculosis.