Jean-Baptiste Gardeil

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Jean-Baptiste Gardeil (* 1726 in Toulouse ; † April 19, 1808 ibid) was a French doctor and mathematician.

Live and act

Born in Toulouse, he received his first school education there, later he left his hometown for Paris , where he kept in touch with the philosophers and avant-garde of the French Enlightenment. He was a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences since 1755 and for a long time editor of the La Gazette . Gardeil was also a professor of mathematics at the University of Toulouse .

He was friends with the most important representatives of the French Enlightenment, such as Denis Diderot , Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert and Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach . His partner and research assistant M lle de la Chaux († 1755) was the first to translate selected texts from David Hume's economic writings into French.

The entanglements around Jean-Baptiste Gardeil and M lle de la Chaux find their literary expression in the second part of the story Ceci n'est pas un conte by Denis Diderot. There Diderot reports on the relationship between Gardeil and M lle de la Chaux. So she gave up everything out of love for him. At first, their relationship and their coexistence seem happy. Gardeil works as a translator until he is no longer able to do it. His wife helps him and learns Greek, Hebrew and other languages ​​specifically for this. She gives him everything to make him happy. But one day he wants nothing more to do with her, on the grounds that he no longer feels the slightest thing for her. She no longer understands the world and needs medical treatment. Later she recovers halfway, but spends the end of her life in poor conditions, although she could have married the doctor who treated her and lived with him in prosperity.

Works (selection)

  • Traduction des œuvres médicales d'Hippocrate, sur le texte grec. 1801
  • Prima pars Institutionum medicarum, Hygiène. Ad usum alumnorum saluberrimæ facultatis in alma Academia Tolosana. JP Robert, 1776

literature

  • Histoire et mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences, inscriptions et belles lettres de Toulouse. L'Académie, 1837 p. 173

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Adolph Carl Peter Callisen: Medical Writer's Lexicon of the now living physicians, surgeons, obstetricians, pharmacists and naturalists of all educated peoples: Addendum: F - Hir: containing: corrections, additions, the more recent literature and the medical writers who died since 1830. , Volume 28 self-published 1840 p. 153
  2. ↑ Laurence L. Bongie: Retour à Mademoiselle de la Chaux, ou il Faut-encore marcher sur des œufs? Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie Année 1989 Volume 6 Numéro 6 pp. 62-104
personal data
SURNAME Gardeil, Jean-Baptiste
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French doctor and encyclopaedist
DATE OF BIRTH 1726
PLACE OF BIRTH Toulouse
DATE OF DEATH April 19, 1808
Place of death Toulouse