Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/145

Rh early youth, she gave her time to the arts, and, indefatigable in the pursuit, studied with success, music, painting, history, and geography. Satisfied with the advances she had made in these sciences, she sought some new object of research; and her friend, Magdalen Basseporte, advised her to apply to the study of anatomy, to which Mademoiselle Bieron consecrated the rest of her life, without any help but her natural disposition to learn, and the assiduous reading of the most learned anatomical books; she surmounted the repugnances of her sex, and the difficulties of penetrating into hospitals and halls of surgery, at the hours when she would be secure from encountering any students there; and applied herself, with unremitting assiduity, to this difficult science, only suspending her researches, to make at home ingenious models of the discoveries with which she had enriched it. After more than thirty years of this laborious study, and a multitude of particular experiments made at her house and at her expence, she received the applauses of all the learned in that branch of knowledge, on the chefs d'oeuvres that her hand had produced. But unpatronized, even at the age of 56, and confined by a moderate patrimony, which, by great economy, she found means to share with the poor; women, to whom the care of the sick is principally consigned, and for which their delicacy and address so peculiarly qualify them, would have found a good school at the house of this able instructor. F. C BINS,