Antoine François de Fourcroy
Antoine François Comte de Fourcroy (born June 15, 1755 in Paris , † December 16, 1809 ibid) was a French doctor, chemist and politician.
Life
Antoine François Comte de Fourcroy was the son of the pharmacist Jean Michel de Fourcroy (1710–1783), who worked in the house of the Duke of Orléans (see Louis Philip of France (1773–1850)). His mother was Jeanne Laugier († 1762). He had two sisters, Jeanne Adélaïde de Fourcroy (1747-1819) and Louise Denise de Fourcroy (1750-1824). His mother died when he was seven years old.
De Fourcroy left the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris prematurely at the age of fifteen for financial reasons , taught children to write and became a clerk (clerk) in the office of a law firm.
The anatomist Félix Vicq d'Azyr (1748–1794) persuaded de Fourcroy's father to admit him to study at the Faculté de médecine in Paris . He studied medicine in Paris, a. a. at Vicq d'Azyr, and received his doctorate on September 28, 1780 despite great financial difficulties . An application for a free doctorate was rejected. The subject of the dissertation was De usu et abusu chemiae in medendo .
As a student, he showed great skills in chemistry and had the opportunity to work and be trained in the private laboratory of Jean-Baptiste-Michel Bucquet (1746–1780), his teacher and doctoral supervisor. In the period from 1783 to 1787, he studied chemistry at the École vétérinaire d'Alfort . Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788) appointed him professor of chemistry at the Jardin du Roi in 1784 (see Muséum national d'histoire naturelle ). AF de Fourcroy finally gave independently courses with a total of seventy published lectures, Leçons élémentaires d'histoire naturelle et de Chimie (Paris, 1782), he also gave a summer course in materia medica from 1782 to 1784 . In all of his lectures, AF de Fourcroy emphasized the relationship between chemistry and natural history and their application and importance in medicine. One of his important doctoral students was Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin (1763-1829).
In 1792, as a member of the Welfare Committee, he pushed through the introduction of the equality of weights and measures and was also active on the Committee of Public Education and in the Section des armes . At his suggestion, the écoles de santé were founded in Paris, Montpellier and Strasbourg in 1794. In 1794 he was a member of the National Convention .
After the 9th Thermidor , the end of the reign of terror, he became a member of the welfare committee Comité de salut public . In 1795 he was elected to the Council of Elders Le Conseil des Anciens , but in 1798 he resumed teaching chemistry. Napoléon Bonaparte appointed him to the Council of State and in 1801 entrusted him with the top management of public education and from 1802 to 1808 he was Minister of Education. In 1808 he was given the title of count comte and died of a stroke the following year . He was buried in the Le Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, 11th Division.
He was already accused during his lifetime, and in the Lavoisier biography of Édouard Grimaux from 1895, of not having done enough for the life of his protégé Lavoisier (the widow of Lavoisier broke with him because of this) than the latter like the other tax farmers before Revolutionary tribunal stood, especially since he himself belonged to the Jacobins. However, according to the memories of his cousin Laugier (handed down by Georges Cuvier ), he stood up for him shortly before the trial and penetrated as far as Robespierre into a meeting of the public security committee, but the latter ignored his advocacy with threatening silence. Fourcroy has also been shown to champion another scientist who had been denounced, Jean d'Arcet (Darcet). As a Jacobin, for example, he was involved in the destruction of the Academy of Sciences that brought the revolutionaries into contact with the king and the nobility.
Scientific achievements
Fourcroy is also familiar with field work in natural history, for example he carried out an inventory in the form of a detailed report on the insects from the Paris region, which he published under the heading Entomologia parisiensis (Paris, 1785). Some research on the anatomy of muscles is known from this period, but in the future he concentrated on chemistry.
He is known as one of the authors of a book on a new chemical nomenclature, Nomenclature chimique (1787), together with Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816), Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) and Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748) -1822). This was a fundamental script of the first chemical revolution founded by Lavoisier.
In 1785 his metallurgical treatise on bell metal, Recherches sur le métal des cloches, appeared .
Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin was his assistant from 1783 to 1791, while Vauquelin's publications initially appeared as those of his superior, later with both names being mentioned. The two discovered osmium in platinum at the same time as Smithson Tennant and named it "ptène".
He was a member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences , the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and the Bavarian and Gottingen Academy of Sciences .
Works
Its main scripts are:
- De usu et abusu chemiae in medendo . Parisiis Quillau, (1779)
- Leçons élémentaires d'histoire naturelle et de chimie (Paris 1781, 2 vol .; 1791, 5 vol .; under the title:
- Système des connaissances chimiques et de leurs applications aux phenomènes de la nature et de l'art , Paris 1801, 6 vols .; German in an extract by F. Wals, Königsberg 1801–1803, 4 vols.); with Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier , Guyton de Morveau and Claude-Louis Berthollet
- Entomologia parisiensis (Paris, 1785)
- Méthode De Nomenclature Chimique (Paris 1787, online ( Memento of March 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at u-strasbg.fr),
- German as a method of chemical nomenclature for the anti-inflammatory system of Morveau, Lavoisier, Berthollet and de Fourcroy . Reprint d. Vienna 1793 edition, ISBN 3-487-06450-2 .
- La Médecine éclairée par les sciences physiques, ou Journal des découvertes relatives aux différentes parties de l'art de guéri (Paris 1791–1792, 4 vols.)
- Philosophy chimique (Paris 1792; 3rd ed., The. 1806; German as chemical philosophy or basic truths of modern chemistry: arranged in a new way by AF Fourcroy. Translated from the French by Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler . Leipzig 1796)
- Tableaux synoptiques de chimie (Paris 1805; German as synoptic tables covering the entire scope of chemistry: as a guide for the lectures on this science in the schools of Paris , von Görres, Koblenz 1802).
Most of his works have also been published in German translation and have been reprinted several times.
Honor
The genus Furcraea from the family Asparagaceae , subfamily Agavoideae , is named after him .
literature
- Alain Queruel: Antoine de Fourcroy. Savant, franc-maçon, homme politique . Hermann, Paris, 2009.
- Georges Kersaint: Mémoires du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Antoine François de Fourcroy, sa vie et son oeuvre . Ed. Muséum, Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1966, p. 59
- William Arthur Smeaton : Fourcroy, 1755-1809 . Ed. Heffer & Sons, Cambridge, 1962, p. 58
- Michel Foucault: The Birth of the Clinic. An archeology of the medical eye. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1985
- Ursula Klein; Wolfgang Lefèvre: Materials in eighteenth-century science. MIT-Press, Cambridge 2007
- Fourcroy, Antoine François de . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 6, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, pp. 470–470.
Web links
- Literature by and about Antoine François de Fourcroy in the catalog of the German National Library
- Portrait of AF de Fourcroy at US National Library of Medicine
- Gravestone in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, 11ème division
- Large summary table of the nomenclature. (1788) English translation James St. John of the Méthode de nomenclature chimique (1787)
- Emmanuel GRISON: Fourcroy. , at Société de amis de la bibliothèque et de l'histoire de l'école polytechnique. (SABIX)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b W. A. Smeaton: Fourcroy, Antoine François De . encyclopedia.com. Retrieved May 6, 2012.
- ↑ a b Genealogy of the family . livois.com. Retrieved May 6, 2012.
- ^ A b Antoine Francois de Fourcroy . Short biography in tabular form on uni-ulm.de. Retrieved May 6, 2012.
- ↑ Xavier Riaud: Antoine François Fourcroy (1755–1809), médecin et comte d'Empire, reformateur et promoteur de l'enseignement hospitalo-universitaire en France ( French ) napoleonicsociety.com. Retrieved May 6, 2012.
- ↑ Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Fourcroy, Antoine François de. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 417.
- ^ Pierre M. Conlon: Le Siècle des Lumières: bibliographie chronologique T. XIX , 1779–1781
- ↑ Wolfgang U. Eckart : Antoine François Fourcroy , In: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the present , 1st edition 1995 CH Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung München p. 140, 2nd edition 2001 pp. 118 + 119, 3rd edition 2006 Springer Verlag Heidelberg, Berlin, New York p. 124. Medical glossary 2006 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .
- ^ Madison Smartt Bell: Lavoisier in the Year One , Atlas Books, Norton, 2005, p. 182
- ↑ Gillispie, Science and Polity in France, Princeton UP, 2004, p. 324
- ^ Rolf Haubrichs, Pierre-Léonard Zaffalon: Osmium vs. 'Ptène': The Naming of the Densest Metal . In: Johnson Matthey Technology Review . No. 61 , 2017, doi : 10.1595 / 205651317x695631 ( matthey.com ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fourcroy, Antoine François de |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Fourcroy, Antoine François; Fourcroy, Antoine François, Comte de; Fourcroy, Antoine-François |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French doctor, chemist and politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 15, 1755 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 16, 1809 |
| Place of death | Paris |