Laurent Joubert

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Painting of Laurent Joubert Laurent Joubert (1529-1583).jpg
Painting of Laurent Joubert

Laurent Joubert (16 December 1529, Dauphiné, France - 21 October 1582, near Montpellier, France) was a French physician. He travelled to Montpellier at the age of 21 to study medicine, and became a student of Guillaume Rondelet, the chancellor of the Medical Faculty at the University of Montpellier. Soon after Rondelet's death in 1556, Joubert succeeded him as chancellor. He was later summoned by Catherine de' Medici, the queen consort of France, to be her personal physician. Joubert went on to become one of the physicians to Henry III of France. Joubert was married to Louise Guichard, the sister of the doctor to the King of Navarre. [1]

Dauphiné Place in France

The Dauphiné or Dauphiné Viennois, formerly Dauphiny in English, is a former province in southeastern France, whose area roughly corresponded to that of the present departments of Isère, Drôme, and Hautes-Alpes. The Dauphiné was originally the County of Albon.

Montpellier Prefecture and commune in Occitanie, France

Montpellier is a city near the south coast of France on the Mediterranean Sea. It is the capital of the Hérault department. It is located in the Occitanie region. In 2016, 607,896 people lived in the urban area and 281,613 in the city itself. Nearly one third of the population are students from three universities and from three higher education institutions that are outside the university framework in the city.

Guillaume Rondelet French physician

Guillaume Rondelet, known also as Rondeletus (Rondeletius), was Regius professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier in southern France and Chancellor of the University between 1556 and his death in 1566. He achieved renown as an anatomist and a naturalist with a particular interest in botany and zoology. His major work was a lengthy treatise on marine animals, which took two years to write and became a standard reference work for about a century afterwards, but his lasting impact lay in his education of a roster of star pupils who became leading figures in the world of late-16th century science.

Contents

Works

Joubert was a significant figure in a movement that sought to challenge medical superstitions and ignorance in France. In his two-volume Erreurs Populaires of 1578, he made clear, for example, that it was untrue that male children were born at full moon and female children at new moon. On the other hand, he erroneously suggested that a male child could be conceived at certain times of night or the month. Joubert's stated aim was to raise physicians and surgeons from their "routine illiterate practice" and to inform the people how better to look after themselves. In this endeavour, he made use of the growing influence of the press, contributing to the transfer from an oral to a printed tradition in medical knowledge. [2]

Joubert and his colleagues met with opposition from those who, regarding the classical Greek and Latin medical texts as sacrosanct, were suspicious of medical advice written in French. Joubert argued that those who sought to deny people the knowledge to maintain their own health were no better than those who denied them the right to read religious texts in their own language. In effect, he was challenging closely guarded monopolies on medical knowledge, though he insisted that patients would be more likely to follow doctors' orders if they could understand them. [2]

In Erreurs Populaires, Joubert addressed a series of popular errors in turn, which he documented and then discussed by reference to his own experience and practice. Of one local custom, he wrote: "Is it a good idea to sit a woman in labour on a hot couldron, or to put her husband's hat on her stomach, as do the good women of the villages around Montpellier? The hat probably will not help much, except perhaps to serve as a compress and help expulsion". [3]

Joubert wrote numerous medical texts in both Latin and French. Several of these were only published a few years before his death, and others continued to be published after he died, with the last work being published in 1603. His edition of Grande Chirurgie, a work by the 14th-century surgeon Guy de Chauliac, was a translation into French from the original Latin, making the work more accessible to contemporary surgeons.

Guy de Chauliac French physician and surgeon

Guy de Chauliac, also called Guido or Guigo de Cauliaco, was a French physician and surgeon who wrote a lengthy and influential treatise on surgery in Latin, titled Chirurgia Magna. It was translated into many other languages and widely read by physicians in late medieval Europe.

Notes

  1. ↑ Broomhall (2004) p.63
  2. 1 2 Davis, 223–25.
  3. ↑ Davis, 260–61. Joubert thought the practice may have originated as a way to represent the husband at the delivery.

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References

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