Lorenz Heister's "molar gland"

Abstract

The buccal fat pad is a mass of specialized adipose tissue described in 1801 by famous French anatomist Xavier Bichat and referred to in medical literature as the "boule de Bichat." This study considered medical publications from 1538 to 1801 and found no descriptions of the buccal fat pad until 1727, when Lorenz Heister, anatomist and surgeon from Altdorf, Germany, first identified the "glandula molaris" and painted it in his Compendium Anatomicum, which appeared in several Latin editions during the eighteenth century.