[Pierre Masson. A precursor and re-discoverer (1880-1959)].

Pierre Masson, born in Dijon in November 1880, intended to be a clinician doctor. After being seriously troubled with bad health and following the advice of his master Eugène Bataillon, a researcher who found out the parthenogenesis of batrachian ova, he turned towards a scientific carrier as a biologist. Appointed Chairman in Strasbourg where he held the chair of pathology as early as the first world war, he left France in 1927 to assume the same functions in Montreal. There, he died in May 1959, after creating one of the most brilliant schools of pathology of the XXth century. Most of Pierre Masson's works are precursory as regards the scientific conceptions of his period. He gave them two predominant orientations: on the one hand, works of pure technical histology, resulting in original processes of fixation, coloration and argentation which are still used today; on the other hand, numerous works of oncologic pathology, which allowed him to individualize new tumors, such as the "spermatocytoma" or the "glomus tumor". An observed endowed with a vast culture in biology, Pierre Masson considers the pathologic fact as a real "natural experience" which reveals unsuspected properties of the tissues or allows to discover normal structures which could not be found out easily without it. In this regard he gave pathology a renewed vitality.