Henry Charlton Bastian

Bastian was born at Truro, Cornwall and graduated from University of London in 1861.[1] He obtained his M.D. in 1866. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1868 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1870.[1]

In 1867, Bastian was elected Professor of Pathology and Assistant Physician at UCL Medical School and successively became Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCL Medical School.[1] In 1868, he became assistant physician to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, then full physician in 1887. He served at the National Hospital until he retired in 1912.[1]

He was an advocate of the doctrine of archebiosis.[1] He believed he witnessed the spontaneous generation of living organisms out of non living matter under his microscope.

• Monograph of the Anguillulidae (1865)
• The Modes of Origin of Lowest Organisms (1871)
• The Beginnings of Life: Being Some Account of the Nature, Modes of Origin and Transformation of Lower Organisms, I–II (1872)
• Evolution and the Origin of Life (1874)
• The Brain as an Organ of Mind (1880)
• The "muscular sense" its nature and cortical localisation (1887) [2]
• A Treatise on Aphasia and Other Speech Defects (1898)
• The Nature and Origin of Living Matter (1905)
• The Evolution of Life (1907)
• The Origin of Life (1911)

• Bastian-Bruns law or Bastian-Bruns sign
• Receptive aphasia

• Strick, James. (1999). Darwinism and the Origin of Life: The Role of H. C. Bastian in the British Spontaneous Generation Debates, 1868-1873. Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1): 51-92.