Jean René Constant Quoy

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Jean René Constant Quoy

Jean René Constant Quoy (born November 10, 1790 in Maillé , Département Vendée , † July 4, 1869 in Rochefort-sur-Mer ) was a French ship's doctor , zoologist and anatomist . As a ship's doctor and naturalist, he took part in the circumnavigation of Louis de Freycinets on the frigate L'Uranie from 1817 to 1820 . He completed his second circumnavigation from 1826 to 1829 on board the Astrolabe under the command of Jules Dumont d'Urville .

Youth and early career

Jean René Constant Quoy was born on November 10, 1790 in Maillé near Maillezais in the south of the Vendée, as one of six children in a family of doctors who had been working in Nivernais for generations . He spent his childhood with an aunt in Saint-Jean-de-Liversay in the Charente-Maritime department . At the age of just 16 he entered the École de médecine navale de Rochefort in November 1806 and began training as a surgeon . In August 1807 he was appointed "3rd class surgeon" and in November he began his service as a naval doctor on various warships. Most of the trips were patrols off the French Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, with several sea battles occurring. Two longer journeys took Quoy to Guadeloupe and Réunion . In 1813 he was permanently admitted to the corps of marine doctors and in 1814 he received his doctorate at the University of Montpellier .

Circumnavigation of the world 1817 to 1820

On September 17, 1817, the corvette Uranie set sail under her commandant Louis de Freycinet . On board were Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard ship doctors and zoologists, the botanist was Charles Gaudichaud-Beaupré . Other important participants on the trip were the marine hydrologist Louis Isidore Duperrey , who a few years later became the commander of a research trip , the draftsman Jacques Arago and Freycinet's wife Rose de Freycinet , who was secretly brought on board .

The route led from Toulon via Gibraltar and Tenerife to Rio de Janeiro and on via the Cape Colony , Mauritius Réunion to Shark Bay on the western Australian coast. The route then led through the Pacific with stops in Timor , New Guinea , Guam and Hawaii to Sydney . On the way back, the Uranie was shipwrecked on February 14, 1820 in a bay in the Falkland Islands . A large part of the scientific yield was lost, mainly botanical collection specimens from Gaudichaud-Beaupré. Only after two months were the castaways rescued by the American Mercury . Freycinet bought the ship and renamed it La Physicienne . The expedition ended on November 13, 1820 when the Physicienne entered the port of Marseille . Of the 126 members of the crew, only seven died during the voyage, and another 38 deserted.

The expedition was regarded as a great scientific success and as an encouragement for further natural history research trips. The processing of the collected material took several years after the return. Quoy wrote several publications with his colleague Gaimard. Her volume Zoologie du voyage des Corvettes l'Uranie et la Physicienne , which appeared in Paris in 1824, contained a number of initial descriptions , some of which are still valid today. On his return, Jean René Quoy was promoted to surgeon first class and appointed professor of anatomy at the École de médecine navale de Rochefort. In April 1824 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Académie nationale de médecine and in May 1825 made a Knight of the Legion of Honor .

Circumnavigation 1826 to 1829

On April 25, 1826, the corvette Astrolabe left the port of Toulon under the command of Jules Dumont d'Urville . In addition to scientific research, one of the goals of the trip was to clarify the fate of Jean-François de La Pérouse, who had been missing on two ships for almost forty years . There were 13 officers and 66 men on board the Astrolabe . Jean René Quoy and Joseph-Paul Gaimard as well as Pierre Adolphe Lesson were on board as ship's doctors and zoologists . Quoy and Gaimard were again entrusted with research tasks as zoologists and Lesson as botanists.

The route led over the Cape Verde Islands and Rio de Janeiro and around Cape Horn to the Australian port of Port Jackson . There the expedition received from Charles Frazer , director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney, numerous newly discovered plants for the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle , which were immediately sent to Paris by mail. The astrolabe's journey continued via Tasmania to New Zealand and to various stations in the Pacific such as Tonga , Fiji and New Guinea . On arrival in Hobart in December 1827, the crew learned that the remains of the two ships from La Pérouse had been found on Vanikoro . On February 21, 1828 the Astrolabe landed on Vanikoro. Only a few references to the ships of La Pérouse could be found, but the crew celebrated a mass on the beach and erected a memorial. The further journey led via Guam to the Dutch East Indies , where a longer stay in Batavia was made. On the return journey, 14 sick members of the crew, including the ship's doctor Gaimard, had to be left behind on Mauritius in November. The astrolabe reached Marseille on February 24, 1829.

The results of the research trip were received with enthusiasm by experts. They were published in 12 text volumes and 4 table volumes between 1830 and 1835. The four volumes of text on zoology - with the exception of entomology - were again written by Quoy and Gaimard.

After the trips

Quoy resumed his anatomical teaching at the École de médecine navale de Rochefort and was promoted repeatedly until 1836. In May 1830 he was elected correspondent for the Académie des sciences . In the following years he took an active part in academic life in Paris. He served for a year in Toulon , where a cholera epidemic was rampant, and then for ten years in Brest . In 1848 he was appointed Inspecteur en chef de santé de la Marine, the highest post in French military medicine and comparable to a division general. In this position, he reformed the French navy's health system by constantly keeping nurses and naval doctors available in every naval port and introducing an age limit for naval doctors. He himself retired in November 1858. Like his childhood, he spent the last ten years of his life in Saint-Jean-de-Liversay.

Honors

Memberships

Order of Merit

  • Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (May 22, 1825)
  • Officier de la Légion d'Honneur (April 26, 1845)
  • Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur (December 31, 1852)

Dedication names (selection)

The following taxa were named after Jean René Constant Quoy:

Mollusks
Crustaceans
fishes
Reptiles
Birds
plants

Works

Initial descriptions (selection)

Arrow worms
Cnidarians
Mollusks
Crustaceans
fishes
Birds
Mammals

Web links

literature

  • Noël, J.-P .: JRC Quoy (1790-1869), inspecteur général du Service de Santé de la Marine, médecin, naturaliste, navigateur. Sa vie, son milieu, son œuvre. Thèse de Médecine, Bordeaux 1960.
  • Sardet, Michel: Les mémoires inédits du naturaliste circumnavigateur Jean-René Quoy. Un témoignage exceptionnel sur la société du XIXe siècle. Pharmathèmes, Paris 2009. ISBN 978-2-914399-27-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julius Victor Carus : History of Zoology up to Joh. Müller and Charl. Darwin . R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1872, p. 652-653 ( online ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Françoise Thibaut: Qui est Quoy? Naturaliste, médecin de la marine à voile, et correspondant des académies trop méconnu! , Canal Académie website , transcription of a broadcast on December 2, 2012, accessed on March 17, 2019.
  3. ↑ Quoy, Jean René Constant , Léonore database of the Archives Nationales, accessed on March 17, 2019.
  4. ↑ Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5 . ("Quoy", p. 214).
personal data
SURNAME Quoy, Jean René Constant
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French zoologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1790
PLACE OF BIRTH Maillé near Maillezais , Vendée department , France
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1869
Place of death Rochefort-sur-Mer , Charente-Inférieure department , France