See also: Tronchin

Theodore Tronchin , born with Geneva the June 24th 1709 and died in Paris the November 30th 1781, is a Médecin Suisse, one of the most famous doctors of.

Descendant of Remi Tronchin, officer with the service of Henri IV, of a former family of Arles, allied at the first houses of Provence, of which a branch had taken refuge in Geneva, at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the godson of Theodore de Bèze, the theologist Theodore Tronchin (1582-1657), the father of Theodore Tronchin was one of the richest bankers of this city.

As well of others, Tronchin had been first of all intended for a career very different from that which it was to illustrate later: his/her “austere and rigid” father had solved to make an ecclesiastic of it. But the young man, while being rather assiduous with his studies, liked passionately certain entertainments well not very compatible with the study of theology, even reformed; he was carried even so much to the dance, which he was going in the night to make several miles with foot, to seek balls without the knowledge of his/her parents.

After the ruin of his/her father after the fall of the System of Law, Tronchin was sent as of the sixteen years age, in England, near Lord Bolingbroke his relative. But this statesman was then in disgrace: he could return of another service to young the Genevese, only to direct his studies, and to get the friendship of several scientists and it to him is in England, during its studies of humanities which he decided to embrace the medical career. He followed the courses of the Université of Cambridge where he had for first Master famous Dr. Mead, doctor of Georges II. The reading of the works of Boerhaave inspired a so keen desire to him to hear it in person, which it went at once the Université of Leyde, where it was delivered with passion to the study of medicine under the auspices of this famous man. Having known that its Master had said that the care that it gave to his hair was to make him waste time well, it cut at the moment its hair, and appeared the following day, in this state, with the lessons of Boerhaave, struck astonishment with the sight of a similar sacrifice.

Apràs to have received its doctorate in 1730, Tronchin is established with Amsterdam, and was named president of the college of medicine and inspector of the hospitals. He married a grand-daughter of the large-boarder Johan de Witt and the stathouder offered to him the place of its first doctor but, its compatriots claiming it, he returned, in 1750, in Geneva where the council-D' state gave him the title of professor emeritus of medicine.

Tronchin was not believed not exempted nevertheless to open a course of Anatomie to the Academy of medicine of which it is named professor emeritus. It mainly stuck to it to fight the prejudices whose medicine was then infected, and to inspire to the pupils a salutary distrust traditional theories. The great service that Tronchin returned to humanity, and that the discovery of vaccinates should not make forget, was the practice of the inoculation. Propagandist of vaccination against the Variola, just like Vieusseux, it introduced the variolisation in France and provided the article “inoculation” to the Encyclopédie of Diderot in which it emits a vehement criticism of the superstitions and State which paralyzes any evolution of the medicine and the health of the subjects of the king. After having given of it the salutary example in its own family, he did not neglect anything to propagate it in France: “the inoculation, said it, makes only millésimer the mankind, while the small natural pox decimated it.”

The sovereigns disputed the advantage of having it in their states. The empress Elisabeth I {{Re}} made him proposals to attract it in Russia. In 1766, it was destined for Paris, to inoculate the children of the Duc of Orleans and, in 1765, the Duc of Parma entrusted to them his to him. This prince wanted to retain it near him, and made it admit with the row of the patricians. But Tronchin preferred the stay of its fatherland to the most brilliant offers.

Fixed at Geneva, Tronchin was seen there consulted by whole Europe. However the duke of Orleans, by his reiterated authorities, managed to make him accept the place of its first doctor. Its noble and gracious manners, its eagerness to relieve all the evils, added a feeling of affection to the high regard which one could not refuse with his rare talents. The extreme variety of its knowledge, and charms it its conversation, made seek Doctor Tronchin, like society man, by those which did not need any as doctor.

It counted among his friends the most famous men in philosophy and in the letters, such as Voltaire, his compatriot Rousseau, Diderot, etc Voltaire, which it had contributed much to fix in the vicinity of Geneva and that it assisted in his last disease, celebrated his talents in worms.

Foreigner with any systematic mind, Tronchin constantly endeavoured to propagate a Hygiène simple and natural. The women and the children were the object of its particular care: at the ones, it treated the disease of the vapors, then with the mode, by the great outdoors, the exercise and the occupation; it frees the others, as much as possible, of the bindings which deformed their size and destroyed their health. Noting that to remain sitted long hours supports blockings and irritations of the Côlon it recommends the use of an office where one writes upright and the walk. It rises against the sedentary life, the Sommeil too prolonged, the port of the wigs while proclaiming the virtues of walk and the benefits of the stays in the countryside.

It made disappear the method absurdity to lock up the patients in a empestée atmosphere, by depriving them of any communication with the surrounding air. It improved the processes of the inoculation, in substituent the vesicatory ones with the incision, always a little painful, and especially alarming for the children. Naturally sensitive and beneficial, it devoted two hours per day regularly to receive the poor. During these consultations, it had a money bag close to him, giving to each patient of what to get the drugs which it prescribed. One of his/her friends recommending to him a disabled person out of state to pay its care: “I would have quite bad idea of me, says it, if it were necessary, at my age, to inform to me to make my duty. ” Its liberalities were so numerous that, in spite of the very considerable product of the exercise of its art, it left with his children only one poor fortune.

When Tronchin died, in his sixty-thirteenth year, Truck, distinguished doctor, who witnessed his last moments, exclaimed with pain: “Ah! if this great man could hear us, he would cure itself! ” Thomas made of Tronchin concerning praise in a Letter with Suzanne Necker (January 18th 1782): “it made, says it, the good in silence, always useful, always calm, as indifferent to admiration as emulously, not having more ostentation of the words as that of the actions, not entrusting but to misfortune the secrecy of its virtues, and not revealing with the public its genius but by its benefits”. Louis and Condorcet pronounced its Éloge , the first with the academy of surgery, and the second with the Academy of Science.

He was member of the principal academies of Europe.

Tronchin was too occupied to be able to leave much writings. In addition to articles of medicine, in the Encyclopedia , and an edition of the Works of Baillou with a Foreword , one has of him only two theses: Of nymphâ ; Of clytoride , Leyde, 1736, in-4°. ; and a small treaty: Of cólica pictorum , Geneva, 1757, in-8°, which was highly criticized by Bouvart and finally of the Observations on the cure of an ophthalmia, and on herpies épiploïques interns, in the volume V Memories of the academy of surgery . Senebier ensures (Hist. littér. from Geneva, III , in-4°) that Tronchin had left, in manuscript, a great number of invaluable works on almost all the parts of art to cure; but one is unaware of what they became. In the same way, one frequently testified the desire to have the Recueil of the consultations of this skilful expert.

References

• Henry Tronchin, a doctor of, Theodore Tronchin, 1709-1781, Paris, Plon-Nourishes, 1906,