Gustave-Marie Bleicher

Gustave Bleicher

Gustave-Marie Bleicher , born as Marie-Gustave Bleicher , called Gustave Bleicher , (born December 16, 1838 in Colmar , † June 8, 1901 in Nancy ) was a French military doctor , pharmacist , biologist and geologist who mainly studied the geology of the Explored Alsace and Lorraine .

Life

After attending the Catholic grammar school and the Collège libre in Colmar, Bleicher trained as a pharmacist for two years in Colmar with M. Reutinger, who also did botanical studies. After completing his apprenticeship in Besançon in 1857, he switched to the military - initially as a volunteer in the medical corps  - and in 1859 won admission to the military medical school in Strasbourg through a competition . He studied medicine at the University Medical Faculty and botany at the Higher Pharmacy School in Strasbourg. In 1862 he received his doctorate (Nouveaux apercu sur la theorie des rapports botanico-chimiques) . He then continued his training as a military doctor at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After graduating in 1863, he took part in a scientific excursion to Rome, where he met eminent scholars and deepened his interest in geology and archeology. In the military he was first with the 5th Battalion of Hunters in Toulouse, where he traveled to the Pyrenees and the Massif Central and attended geology lectures from Alexandre Leymérie . He also became acquainted with the geologist Henri Magnan (1831–1872), who was also studying there at the time, and  who greatly influenced him in his own investigations in the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and later in the Vosges - presented in his dissertation from 1870. In 1867 he received his licentiate in natural history in Toulouse and, after a competition in 1869, was a tutor for botany and natural history at the military medical school in Strasbourg. There he also received his first class pharmacy degree and was working on his dissertation when the Franco-German War broke out. He served as a military doctor during the siege of Strasbourg and after its end went with the other members of the faculty to Montpellier , one of three pharmaceutical universities in France at the time (Paris, Strasbourg, Montpellier). There he received his doctorate in geology in November 1870 (Essai de géologie comparée des Pyrénées, du Plateau Central et des Vosges) .

Bleicher traveled for research purposes in the Midi and the Cevennes and was stationed as a military doctor in Oran in Algeria in 1872 , where he continued his scientific research in geology , archeology , biology , ethnography . In 1874 he took part in a French delegation to Morocco as a scientific companion.

Bleicher left the military in 1876 and became a professor of natural history at the École supérieure de pharmacie in Nancy, of which he became director in 1900. In 1901 he was murdered in his laboratory by a pharmacist named Raymond Four. Four, from whom the pharmacists' commission had confiscated several kilograms of quinine , wanted Bleicher to use it on him. When Bleicher refused, Four first left his office, bought a revolver and ammunition, returned to Bleicher's office and shot him. The case attracted a lot of attention, mainly because no motive was apparent. The perpetrator was previously known as a respected family man, and his act was believed to be that of a mentally ill person.

Bleicher had been married since 1877 but had no children.

Merit and souvenir

As a geologist, Bleicher advocated the then controversial thesis that faults and not just eruptive processes played a role in the formation of mountains such as the Vosges - particularly striking in the rift valley of the Upper Rhine Rift . He classified the main movements in the Upper Jura , which was very controversial at the time because it ran counter to the prevailing theses about the mountain formation of Elie de Beaumont at the time , but was ultimately confirmed by studies by Gustav Steinmann on the German side. Charles Lory (1823–1889) in the Alps and Magnan in the Pyrenees pursued similar new ideas in France .

Eduard Suess quoted him in his book Face of the Earth as a forerunner of comparative studies of mountains.

In his dissertation, Bleicher examined the phenomenon of erosion of mountains such as the Vosges and plains using the example of Lorraine through watercourses. With Mathieu Mieg, with whom he worked for twenty years, he demonstrated carbon formations in the Vosges. He later turned to the geology of Lorraine, including the iron ore deposits mined there. He investigated the transition from Jurassic to Cretaceous and introduced the term tithonium in France . He dealt with the origin of the Grès à Voltzia in the Vosges and with the Eocene and Oligocene around Montpellier.

The first description of the swordtail Limulitella vicensis (Bleicher, 1897) from the Trias ( Keuper ) of Lorraine comes from him .

Bleicher was a member of the Société des sciences naturelles de Strasbourg (1869), the Académie nationale de médecine , the French geological society (1864) and president of the Académie Lorraine des Sciences . In 1897 he chaired a meeting of the French geological society in the Vosges. In 1877 he became a member of the Académie de Stanislas in Nancy.

In 1903, a memorial was erected for him in the pharmacy school in Nancy, as his death was considered a sacrifice to science, and a street in Nancy is named after him.

Fonts (selection)

• Essai de paleontologie de l'oolithe inférieure des bords sud et sud-ouest du Plateau centra . Cusset et Cie, Paris 1872.
• Sur la geologie du Maroc . In: Bulletin de la Soc. Geol. De France . 1875.
• with Charles-Frédéric Faudel: Matériaux pour une étude préhistorique de l'Alsace . 1877-1885.
• Etudes de géologie comparée sur le terrain quaternaire d'Italie, d'Algérie, du Maroc, de l'Est de la France et de l'Alsace . 1880
• Nancy avant l'histoire . Nancy 1882
• Guide du geologue en Lorraine, Meurthe et-Moselle, Vosges . Berger-Levrault et Cie, Paris 1887.
• Les Vosges. Le sol et les habitants . J.-B. Baillière et fils, Paris 1890.
• Sur la découverte ďune nouvelle espèce de limule dans les marnes irisées de Lorraine . In: Bulletin de la Soc. Sci. Nancy Volume 14 (for 1896), 1897, pp. 116-126.

literature

• Mathieu Mieg: Biography de Marie-Gustave Bleicher 1838–1901: Professeur à l'école supérieure de Pharmacie à Nancy . Decker, Colmar 1902, OCLC 494329177 (French).
• Pierre Zweiacker: Gustave-Marie Bleicher . In: Morts pour la science . Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, Lausanne 2007, pp. 167-169, ISBN 2-88074-752-X (French).
• Fanny L'Huillier, Emilie Lucena: Le professeur Marie-Gustave Bleicher, sa vie, son oeuvre, herborisation des etudiants , Université Henri Poincare , Nancy 2011, (Dissertation (docteur en pharmacie) Université Henri Poincare Nancy, faculte de pharmaciele , 7. March 2011, 247 pages full text online PDF, free of charge 247 pages, 30.8 MB (French)).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ His interest in geology arose through his acquaintance with the Alsatian geologist Charles-Frédéric Faudel in 1860, with whom he became friends.