GOODSIR, JOHN, professor of anatomy in the university of Edinburgh from 1846 to 1867, was b. iu 1814, at Anstruther, Fifeshire, in which county his father and grand father had, for many yeays, practiced the profession of medicine with great repute. Very early in life his studious habits and thoughtful disposition attracted attention, and when little more than a boy, he was sent to the university of St. Andre-vs, where he passed through a four years' course of literary and philosophic study. He was after wards apprenticed to 31r. Nasmyth, dentist in Edinburgh, and during his apprenticeship, attended the medical classes both in the university and extra-mural school in that city. He studied anatomy under Dr. Knox, and natural history under prof. Jameson, and was the intimate friend of Edward Forbes, George Wilson, Samuel Brown, and other young men, who have since made for themselves names as ardent students of the natural sciences.
The position of his native town on the sea-coast had very early caused his attention to be directed to marine zoology, and along with his younger brother, Harry, who was afterwards lost in the unfortunate Franklin expedition, he had begun to dissect marine animals, and study their forms and structure, before lie commenced his medical studies. His training as a dentist led.him to undertake an investigation into the development and structure of the teeth, which he afterwards published in an elaborate memoir, and in which he gave the first consistent account of the various stages through which these important organs pass. This essa , published in 1839, at once caused him to be recog nized as an observer of great orijjkality and acuteness. On obtaining his diploma at the college of surgeons, iu Edinburgh,. he returned to Anstruther, to assist his father in practice tind though actively engaged for some years in the arduous duties of a country doctor, he yet found time, not only to pursue numerous important pathological investi gations, but to continue and extend his studies in anatomy and natural history. He formed at the same time an anatomical museum, characterized by the great beauty of the preparations, which was afterwards acquired by the government for the use of the Queen's college, Cork.
He returned to Edinburgh about 1840; and on the conservatorship of the museum of the royal college of surgeons becoming vacant, he applied for, and obtained, the office.
Having now acquired a more extensive field for pathological research, he devoted much attention to the structure and mode of growth of tumors, and other products of disease; and in 1842-43, lie delivered courses of lectures on the diseases of bone, cartilage, and of the various changes which take place in inflammation of these and other important organs. The improvements in the construction of the compound microscope, about this period, furnished him with a most valuable instrument for conducting his inquiries into the more recondite structural phenomena, which constitute the fundamental nature of the changes from a healthy* to a diseased condition of tissues and organs. At the same time, he also investigated the minute structure of the healthy tissues, more especially with reference to the mode in which they performed their functions. He was one of the first observers who strongly insisted on the general diffusion, throughout the animal textures, of the, minute bodies called wuc/ei,- and he pointed out their importance in connection with the "proccSses of growth, secretion, and nutritiOn. His memoir on secreting structures, published in 1842, in the Transactions of the Royal Soddy of Edin burgh, showed, in a most conclusive manner, the influence exercised by the cells within a gland on the secretion formed in its interior. In the same year, he published a descriptiOn of a case, in which a very remarkable vegetable organism, now known as the darcina, ventricuti(see SARCIxA), was periodically discharged in the fluid ejected from the stomach during vomiting In the following year, he communicated 'to the royal society of Edinburgh an account of the structure of the human placenta, which is regarded as a most important contribution to the anatomy of that complex organ. Many of his physiological and pathological essays were afterwards incorporated in a special volume, published in 1845, and the facts which they contain have contributed very materially to establish the important modern pathological doctrine of the origin of morbkj products from changes iu the pre-existing elements of the tissues of the body.