Théodore Turquet de Mayerne
Sir Théodore Turquet de Mayerne ( English also Theodore Mayhern , born September 28, 1573 in Mayerne near Geneva ; March 22, 1655 in Chelsea, London ) was a Geneva physician, personal physician to the French and English kings.
Turquet de Mayerne came from a Huguenot family who fled France to Switzerland from persecution. Theodore Beza was his godfather. He studied in Heidelberg and Montpellier, where he received his doctorate in medicine in 1597. He was a student of Joseph Duchesne . Even then he was concerned with applications of chemistry in medicine following Paracelsus ( iatrochemistry ). In 1600 he settled as a doctor in Paris and in 1600 became the personal physician of the French King Henry IV. Among other things, he treated the later Cardinal Richelieu in 1605 for gonorrhea . He taught the use of mercury, tin, iron, and antimony compounds until the Medical School banned these types of drugs in 1603, especially because of the excessive use of antimony, but the whole alchemical and Paracelsus tendency did not suit the Parisian medical professionals as they believed deviated from the teaching of Galen , and they condemned De Mayerne and his teacher Duchesne (Quercetanus). De Mayerne responded with the only medical paper he wrote in his lifetime. He was in the king's favor and was his doctor, but the queen prevented his appointment as a personal doctor because of his Protestant beliefs. In 1606 he also sold the post of court doctor. After the murder of Henry IV in 1610, he went to England in 1611, where he was the personal physician of King James I of England and treated other high-ranking personalities (such as Robert Cecil , and later John Donne , Oliver Cromwell ). As early as 1606 he was briefly in England and treated the Queen Anne of Denmark and the Crown Prince, about whose death from typhus he wrote a detailed official report (one of his detailed case reports , which make him interesting for medical history). He also remained court doctor under King Charles I and briefly under Charles II , but withdrew soon after he took office. He is buried in St. Martin-in-the-Fields , where a funerary monument is located.
In 1616 he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and knighted as a Knight Bachelor in 1624 . He supported the Royal Society of Apothecaries in obtaining royal patronage and privileges. He was also the founder of the Company of Distillers.
In 1620, when iron was dissolved in dilute sulfuric acid, he discovered oxyhydrogen (hydrogen), i.e. an air-like, flammable substance. This was published in 1700 in the Pharmacopeia he initiated (the directory of all medicines in England). He introduced mercury (I) chloride (calomel) into medicine (especially against syphilis) and described the associated mineral ( calomel ).
He also dealt with colors for painting and advised Peter Paul Rubens , Anthonis van Dyck and other painters. He collected the recipes in the so-called Mayerne manuscript , which also contains information from various painters.
After the plague in 1630, he proposed public health in Great Britain. His medical records were published as Praxis medica by Theodore de Vaux, his godchild, in 1690 . Mayerne posthumously published Thomas Muffet's work on insects .
He was married twice, first to Marguerite de Boetslaer, with whom he had three children (she died in 1628), and from 1630 to Elizabeth Joachimi, with whom he had five children, of whom only one daughter survived.
literature
- Brian Nance: Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art of Medical Portraiture. Amsterdam 2001
- Gudrun Bischoff: The De Mayerne manuscript. The recipes of materials, painting techniques and painting restoration. Munich: Siegl 2004
- Didier Kahn: Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (1567-1625). Librairie Droz, 2007
- Hugh Trevor-Roper : Europe's physician: the various life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne. Yale University Press, 2006
- Entry in Winfried Pötsch, Annelore Fischer, Wolfgang Müller: Lexicon of important chemists . Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-8171-1055-3
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ 1655 in the Lexicon of Eminent Chemists , possibly also 1654
- ↑ Apologia in qua videre est, inviolatis Hippocratis et Galeni legibus, Remedia Chemice praeparata tuto usurpari posse. 1603
- ^ William Arthur Shaw: The Knights of England. Volume 2, Sherratt and Hughes, London 1906, p. 185.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Turquet de Mayerne, Théodore |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | de Mayerne, Théodore; Mayhern, Theodore |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss physicians and chemists |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 28, 1573 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mayerne |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 22, 1655 |
| Place of death | London |