Claude-Toussaint Marot de La Garaye

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Claude-Toussaint Marot de La Garaye

Claude-Toussaint Marot de La Garaye (born October 30, 1675 in Rennes , † July 2, 1755 in Taden ) was a French chemist and philanthropist

Live and act

The de La Garaye couple

Claude-Toussaint Marot de La Garaye was born in Rennes, the second child of Guillaume Marot and Françoise-Marie de Marbœuf. His father came from a family of lawyers. He was a councilor ("conseiller") in the Parliament of Brittany and in 1685 was appointed Count and Governor of the city of Dinan and lord of the castle of La Garaye in Taden . Claude-Toussaint received his school education together with his older brother at the Paris Collège d'Harcourt . After the death of his father in 1693, he joined the musketeer corps with his brother . In 1701 the family inheritance fell to him and he returned to Brittany to the La Garaye castle. He married Marie-Marguerite de la Motte-Piquet and bought the office of parliamentary council. However, due to his low inclination to serious legal studies, he soon gave up this position and he and his wife led a dissolute life at La Garaye Castle.

Charity

hagiography

According to their chroniclers, two events led the La Garaye couple to largely renounce worldly life and commit themselves to religiously motivated charity . Firstly, a riding accident while hunting meant that Marie de La Garaye could no longer have children and secondly, Claude-Toussaint's best friend Marot de La Garaye died in the La Trappe monastery after a serious illness. Sources are contradicting itself, and it has been claimed that the death of a child (according to most sources the couple was childless) caused their moral turnaround.

In 1710, the count transformed a large part of his huge house into a hospice for the sick. He released previously unused land for families to cultivate, and he had dikes and salt extraction systems built. He distributed food and clothing to locals and foreigners. He also looked after English prisoners of war interned in Dinan. He opened a laboratory and a pharmacy in his hospital and employed doctors, surgeons and assistants. The body therapies were supplemented by soul therapies according to the rules of the Trappists . Reports of miraculous healings in the womb reached England and cases of conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism were reported.

chemistry

Garayes mixer

In 1714/15 Claude-Toussanit and Marie-Marguerite de La Garaye received medical training in Paris for over six months. They took part in the courses at the Charité and the Hôtel-Dieu . They learned the basics of chemistry from Nicolas Lémery . During chemical experiments in his laboratory, Claude-Toussaint Marot de La Garaye developed new methods of drug production, which he called "hydraulic chemistry".

In order to gently extract the "essential and medically effective parts" from plant matter and to separate them from the "earthly and coarse parts", he used simple, pure and lukewarm rain or spring water. He set this in motion with the help of a machine and thereby divided the materials that had been put in so that “all of its particles were opened up and torn apart”. He claimed that the active ingredients (“principia activa - sal, oleum or sulfur and mercurius”) combined with the water in this way, but that the “useless earth” (“phlegma and caput mortuum”) fell to the ground. If the water is then gently smoked in steam baths , the particles of matter scattered in the same would come closer together again and be able to unite, so that a “sel essentiel” would remain, in which the “three effective beginnings, sal, oleum or sulfur und mercurius “concentrated and pure, undestroyed just as nature created them, would be together. La Garaye claimed that with the usual methods of extraction using heat and fire, matter would be completely changed, destroyed, their natural order destroyed, strange things added and consequently completely different beings produced. According to his method, however, without the use of heat or fire, every thing is obtained as it is by nature, its effect remains unchanged, everything impure, harmful or coarse is separated out, that is to say, the dose of the medicines is much reduced. To represent the “sels essentiels” made of metals (“minerals”), which he called “quintessences minérales”, he first dissolved them in neutral salt solutions.

The doctor and chemist Pierre-Joseph Macquer judged Garay's process for the cold extraction of "sels essentiels" from plant substances positive and so ordered Louis XV. the Count La Garay to Marly in 1731 to have these new processes demonstrated. He then paid him 50,000 livres tournois in recognition. After the publication of the “Chymie hydraulique” (1746), the king also showed interest in Garaye's methods of representing “quintessences minérales” and he wanted Garaye to demonstrate them to him. Garaye, whose age no longer allowed a trip from Brittany to Paris, apologized for not being able to comply. He asked for a professional to be sent to demonstrate the methods to his castle La Garaye. The choice fell on Pierre-Joseph Macquer, who then studied Garaye's methods for several weeks in the laboratory of La Garaye Castle and wrote a positive report. In the castle Saint-Germain then a laboratory was set up in the Macquer under the eyes of Cardinal de Noailles , the experiments repeated. After the Académie des Sciences had also drawn up a report, the king approved another 25,000 livres tournois for La Garaye.

The German physician and chemist William Henry Sebastian Bucholz examined in 1769 with the comparative method of John Pringle , the antiseptic properties of the produced according Garaye "essential salts" of horse chestnut bark and sarsaparilla .

Awards

  • 1725 Knight ("chevalier") of the "Ordre royal et militaire de Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel et de Saint-Lazare-de-Jérusalem"
  • 1729 "Grand-Hospitalier" ("commandeur") of the same order for the province of Brittany

Works

  • Recueil alphabétique des pronostics dangereux et mortels sur les différentes maladies de l'homme, pour servir à MM. Les curés et autres . Paris 1736, 2nd edition 1770
  • Chymie hydraulique pour extraire les sels essentiels des Végétaux, Animaux & Minéraux, avec l'eau pure . Herissant, Paris 1746 (digitized version) , 2nd edition, Didot, Paris 1775 (digitized version)
    • Chymia hydraulica or newly discovered handles, by means of which one can extract the essential salt from vegetables, animals and minerals with bad water . Frankfurt and Leipzig 1749 (digitized version) , 2nd edition 1755 (digitized version)

literature

Web links

Commons : Claude-Toussaint Marot de La Garaye  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis . Adèle et Théodore, ou lettres sur l'éducation: contenant tous les principes relatifs aux trois différens plans d'éducation, des princes, des jeunes personnes, et des hommes . Lambert & Baudouin, Paris 1782, Volume I, pp. 456–458 (digitized version )
  2. ^ Caroline Norton . The Lady of La Garaye . Macmillan, London 1862 (digitized version) ; 1866 (digitized version) ; 1875 (digitized) . John Bradburn, New York 1864 (digitized version)
  3. ↑ Jean-Marie Peigné. Le comte Marot de la Garaye. Étude biographique d'après les récits contemporains . Bachelin Defense, Paris, 1864 (digitized version )
  4. ↑ Biographies of good women . J. and C. Mozley, London 1865, pp. 242–254 Madame de La Garaye (digitized version )
  5. ^ MFS Claude and Marie de la Garaye . In: Stories of holy lives . R. Washbourne, London 1875, pp. 147–157 (digitized version )
  6. ^ Johann Christian Zimmermann (translator). Nicolas Lémery . Nicolai Lemeri cursus chymicus, or perfect chymist: who teaches the most sensible, easiest and safest way to prepare the chymic preparata and processes occurring in medicine; translated from French . Walther, Dresden 1754, pp. 4–10: From which Principiis Chymicis, or chymic plots. (Digitized version)
  7. ↑ 1 livre tournois = 0.3 g of gold
  8. ^ Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Bucholz . De cortice hippocastani eiusque sale method Garrayana parato . In: Nova Acta Physico-Medica Academiae Caesareae Leopoldino-Carolino Naturae Curiosum . Volume 4 (1770), pp. 264-269 (digitized version ) . --- Chemical experiments on some of the newest local antiseptic substances , Karl Ludolf Hoffmann, Weimar, 1776 (digitized version)
  9. ↑ Chymie hydraulique pour les sels extraire essentiels of Végétaux, Animaux & Minéraux, avec l'eau pure . Herissant, Paris 1746, p. 114 (digitized version)
personal data
SURNAME La Garaye, Claude-Toussaint Marot de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French chemist and philanthropist
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1675
PLACE OF BIRTH Rennes
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 1755
Place of death Taden