Louis de Jaucourt

Biography

He was depicts as follows: “An young man with the pleasant character. It is far from being beautiful, but its knowledge is sure and wide. ” Pertaining to the reformed Religion, its family of old nobility Bourguignon was not in hillock with the suspicion of the authorities. This obliged it to take a false name to go to Geneva to study the Théologie there. He studied then the exact sciences and natural with Cambridge and the Médecine with Leyde, where he became acquainted with Tronchin and Boerhaave. Returned in France, it decided to consign medical teaching that it had acquired in a large encyclopedic dictionary which asked for twenty years of work to him, its Lexicon medicum universalis . Once the finished work, it wanted to make it print with Amsterdam to escape the Censure, unfortunately the Manuscrit, of which there did not exist any copy, disappeared in the shipwreck from the vessel which brought it to the Dutch printer.

The January 8th 1756, Louis de Jaucourt becomes member of the Royal Society of London.

At this point in time Diderot proposed to him to contribute to the Encyclopedia that it had just started. It accepted and provides a great number of articles, but the adversaries of the Lumières succeeded in making prohibit in 1757 the publication when it was with the seventh volume (until the article Gythium). Whereas the other collaborators renonçaient, Jaucourt did not continue of it less its work thanks to secretaries whom it paid of his pocket, going until writing four articles per day. When, after eight years of prohibition, the deliveries could begin again, it had accumulated enough matter so that last ten volumes could appear the same year, in 1765. A contribution on two was of Jaucourt.

In such a mass of writings, one could not prevent that all was not equal, but one reads under the feather of Philipp Blom (“Der Ritter ohne Gesicht”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 14th 2004, p. 48): Whereas certain definitions are rather badly written, one finds under the name of Jaucourt of the contributions whose eloquence yields it of nothing to the great names of its time, like the civil rights, religious persecutions or the freedom of religion.

In public, Diderot spoke in praise of Jaucourt but, in deprived, it was not obstructed to treat it of pedant and this scorning judgment ended up being essential, so much so that one seldom quotes Jaucourt among the authors of the Encyclopedia, although without him the work had never been completed. The importance of its contribution to the Encyclopédie however shows through clearly in the dithyrambic praise which makes him of him Diderot in its Avertissement of volume 8 in 1765: “ If we pushed the cry of joy of the sailor, when it sees the ground, after one night obscure which held it mislaid between the sky and water, it is with Mr. the Knight of Jaucourt that we must. What didn't it make for us, especially in lately? With which constancy he didn't refuse with tender and powerful requests which sought with us to remove it? Never the sacrifice of the rest, the interest and health was not done more whole and more absolute. The most painful research and most ungrateful did not reject it. It of it is occupied without slackening, satisfied with itself, if it could save the others the dislike of it. But is with each sheet of this work to be compensated what misses with our praise; it is no which does not attest and the variety of its knowledge and the extent of its helps. ”

In addition to many articles touching with the Medicine and the Science in the Encyclopedia and of sound Lexicon medicum universalis in 6 volumes disappeared, he is also the author of a Vie of Leibniz , in 1756, as well as great number of memories addressed to various academies or learned societies.

Practitioner medicine only near the poor, it had made gift of his goods to live in the austerity.

II was member of the Académie of Berlin, Stockholm and Bordeaux.

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