Lemery, Louis

(b. Paris, France, 25 January 1677; d. Paris, 9 June 1743)

chemistry, anatomy, medicine.

Louis Lemery was the eldest son of the chemist Nicolas Lemery. Attracted at first to the legal profession, he finally gave in to his father’s wishes and went on to a distinguished career in science and medicine which undoubtedly benefited in part from the reputation of his father. Educated at the Collèege d’Harcourt, he proceeded to the Faculty of Medicine of Paris where he graduated M.D. in 1698, In 1700 he was admitted to the Academy of Sciences of Paris, as an élève of first the botanist Tournefort and then (from 1702) of his father. In 1712 he was elevated to the rank of associé, and in 1715, when his father took the vétérance, Louis succeeded him as chimiste pensionnaire. Between 1707 and 1710 he occasionally deputized for Guy-Crescent Fagon in the chemistry courses at the Jardin du Roi; he shared these duties with Claude Berger and E. F. Geoffroy. When Fagon resigned from the chemistry chair at the Jardin in 1712, however, Geoffroy was chosen over Lemery for the post. Lemery succeeded Geoffroy in this position in 1730.

Lemery was a physician at the Hôtel Dieu from 1710 to his death, a meédecin du roi from 1722, and personal physician to Louis XV’s cousin, the Princesse de conti, in whose salon he composed many of his scientific works. He married Catherine Chapot in 1706, and one daughter survived from the marriage.

The bulk of Lemery’s scientific writings were published in the Meémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences. They dealt mainly with problems of chemical analysis, especially of organic materials, and with fetal anatomy and the origin of monsters. In an early series of papers published between 1705 and 1708 he contested E. F.Geroffroy’s view that iron could be synthesized from certain vegetable oils and mineral earths, and also that iron found in the ashes of plants was a product of the combustion.

Lemery’s most important observations on organic analysis are contained in four papers published in 1719-1721. These represent a reevaluation of the Academy’s long-standing project on the analysis of plants. In the first paper Lemery argued that fire is too destructive a tool for the analysis of organic materials, reducing them all to the same indiscriminate end products-a view his father had suggested in his textbook of 1675. In the subsequent papers, however, it became clear that he had no alternatives to offer to the traditional method of distillation analysis. Consequently he argued for a controlled use of this technique and stated that the important thing in such analysis is not to seek the ultimate principles of organic materials, but to seek only proximate principles. Lemery applied these considerations to the saline constituents of plants and animals, attempting to analyze them in terms of their acid and alkaline components. He concentrated on the ammoniacal and nitrate salts, drawing on the results of an earlier paper (1717) on the formation of niter, in which he had criticized the views of Mayow. In a 1709 paper on the nature of fire and light, he contested traditional Cartesian views and argued that fire and light were distinctive chemical fluids.

Lemery’s anatomical papers dealt with the circulation of the blood in the fetal heart and with the origin of monsters. On this latter topic he disputed the emboitement views of the Academy’s anatomists, Duverney and Winslow, Lemery argued instead that they were the product of purely accidental factors influencing the development of normal embroys in the womb.

In addition to his Academy memoires, Lemery published two monograph. His traité des aliments (1702) is a dictionary of edibles with a description of their nutritional value in terms of chemico-mechanical principles. His Dissertation sur la nourriture des os (1704) arose out of a protracted dispute with Nicolas Andry, whose Traité la génération des vers dans le corps de l’homme Lemery had criticized severely in the Journal de Trévoux. In this work Lemery maintained that part of the marrow had a nutritional function in young bones.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Lemery’s works include Traité des alimens où l’on trouve par ordre, et séparément la différence le choix qu’on doit faire de chacun d’eux particulier (Paris, 1702; 2nd ed., Paris, 1705, repr. 1709; 3rd ed., 2 vols., Paris, 1755, trans. by D, Hay as A Treatise of All Sorts of Foods … (London, 1745); Lemery’s three letters on N. Andry’s book on the generation of worms appeared first in the Journal de Trévoux, beginning in November 1703; see also Dissertation sur la nourriture des os: où l’on explique la nature l’usage de la Moelle. Avec trois lettres sur le livre de la génération des vers dans le corps de l’homme (Paris, 1704). Lemery’s many presentations to the Academy of Sciences are to be found in the Histoire and Mémoirés of the Academy between 1702 and 1740. A complete listing is given in J. M. Quérard, La France Littéraire, V (Paris, 1800), 141—142; Nouvelle biographie générale, XIII (Paris, 1862), cols.603-604, lists the more important papers, while Poggendorff, I, col. 1418, cites the principal chemical papers.

II. Secondary Literature. The principal source for Lemery’s life is the éloge by Dortous de Marain in Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences pour l’année 1743-1746, 185-208; also J. P. Contant, L’enseignement de la chimie au jardin royal des plantes de Paris, 1952), 57-60; and J. A. Hazon, ed., Notice des hommes les plus célèbres de la Faculté de Médecine en l’Université de Paris (Paris, 1778), 195-198.

Lemery’s contributions to organic analysis at the Academy of Sciences are discussed in F. L. Holmes, “Analysis by Fire and Solvent Extractions: the Metamorphosis of a Tradition,” in Isis, 62 (1971), 129-148; some aspects of Lemery’s chemistry are discussed in H. Metzger, Les doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVII à la fin du XVIII siècle (Paris, 1923, repr. 1969), pp. 341-420; and in J. R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, III (London, 1962), 41-42.

Owen Hannaway