Leuret, François

(b. Nancy, France, 30 December 1797; d. Nancy, 6 January 1851),

psychiatry, public health, comparative anatomy.

Leuret’s education was achieved against the wishes of his father, a baker, who wanted his three sons to follow a trade. With his mother’s persistent support, François was sent to a seminary. After an older brother, an army doctor, died in the Napoleonic Wars, François went to Paris to study medicine. In 1818, his father having cut off all funds, he enlisted in the army, a career that suited him ill. Stationed at St.-Denis, he walked to Paris daily to attend medical lectures, notably those of Jean-Étienne Esquirol at the Salpêtrière Hospital. His friend Ulysse Trélat secured a scholarship at Charenton, enabling Leuret to study further with Esquirol and with Spurzheim, and to work in the laboratories at Charenton and Alfort. He published several papers (1824, 1825) and earned his medical doctorate in 1826 with a thesis on changes in the blood. He spent the next twenty years in practice, research, writing, and as medical director of the private Maison de Santé du Gros Caillou in Paris. Late in 1839, Leuret was finally appointed psychiatrist in chief at Bicêtre, succeeding Guillaume Ferrus, whose assistant he had been since 1836. But Leuret was ill and died eleven years later of what seems to have been congestive heart failure. He attained only minor official distinctions and in an unsuccessful bid for the Paris Academy of Medicine in 1836 won only one vote out of 134. His decorations included the Legion of Honor and the Cholera Medal.

Leuret’s early research in physiological chemistry and comparative anatomy resulted in a major book (1839), in which he elaborated the latest microscopic and differential staining techniques. The materials for a second volume were published by Gratiolet in 1857, on the initiative of Leuret’s friend, the publisher J.-B. Baillière. After receiving his M.D. degree, Leuret practiced medicine in Nancy until 1829, when Esquirol appointed him editor of the newly founded Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale. This excellent and influential journal attracted the contributions of concerned physicians, philanthropists, lawyers, and public officials. Leuret’editorial hand is evident in the sections “Correspondence,” “Bibliography,” and “Varia,” and he contributed major papers on cholera (1831), on the Parisian poor (1836), and on his trip through northern Germany and to St. Petersburg where he visited poorhouses and insane asylums(1838).

Psychiatry was Leuret’s major concern. Beginning with the comparative anatomy of the nervous system, he soon focused on psychosomatic and mental illness. His opposition to phrenology appears in two devastating book reviews in the Annales (1836) and a sarcastic account of Gall’s visit to the Salpêtrière (1840). Like his heroes Philippe Pinel and Esquirol, Leuret was committed to “moral,” that is, psychological, therapy. At Bicêtre, he introduced the teaching of academic subjects, dance, gymnastics, and music. He instituted a common dining hall and continued Pinel’ s practice of manual work in the fields. He argues somewhat paradoxically that, confronted with uncooperative patients, the psychiatrist may have to “attack and badger” in order to effect a cure ([1838], 553). He made frequent use of punitive cold showers and dousings, controversial methods that he justified at length in Du traitement moral de la folie (1840).

Leuret’s major contribution as a teacher, therapist, and writer was his opposition to the prevalent tendency to find correlations between morbid brain anatomy and mental illness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete bibliography of Leuret’s works is in Ulysse Trélat, “Notice sur François Leuret,” in Annales d’hygeiène publique et de médecine legale,45 (1851), 241-263. Works cited in the text are Mémoire sur l’altération du sang (Paris, 1826); “Mémoire sur l’épidémie, désignée sous le nom de choléra-morbus,” in Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale,6 (1831), 313-472; “Notice sur les indigents de la ville de Paris,” ibid.,15 (1836), 294-358; “Notice historique sur A. J. B. Parent-Duchatelet,” ibid.,16 (1836), v–xxi; “Notice sur quelques-uns des établissements de bienfaisance du nord de l’Allemagne et de St. Pétersbourg,” ibid.,20 (1838), 346-406; “Mémoire sur le traitement moral de la folie,” in Mémoires de l’Académie royale de médecine de Paris, 7 (1838), 552-576 Anatomic comparée du sytème nerveux considéré dans ses rapports avec l’intelligence, 2 vols. (Paris, 1839-1857), vol. II edited by Pierre Gratiolet; and Du traitement moral de la folie (Paris, 1840).

II. Secondary Literature. On Leuret and his work, see A. Brierre de Boismont, “Notice biographique sur François Leuret, médecin-en-chef de l’hospice de Bicêtre,” in Annales medico-psychologiques, 3 (1851), 512-527; and U. Trélat, “Notice sur François Leuret,” in F. Leuret and P. Gratiolet, Anatomic comparée du système nerveux, I (Paris, 1839), xiii–xxx.

See also the biographies in A. Dechambre, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, 2nd ser., II (Paris, 1869), 403-404; A. Hirsch, Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Ärzte aller Zeiten und Völker, 2nd ed., III (Berlin, 1931), 759-760; and R. Semelaigne, Aliénistes et philanthropes (Paris, 1912), 482-484.

Dora B. Weiner