Section of the History of Medicine.

ALTHOUGH ample justice has been done to him in France, where tributes were paid to him shortly after his death by Roger and Bergeron, and his memory has been kept alive within recent years by the articles of Lereboullet and Lutaud and Dejeant's thesis, Bouillaud is not so well known in this country as he deserves. Bouillaud was one of the most distinguished physicians of the nineteenth century, not only in France, but in any other country, and though he cannot be ranked with Laennec, Bretonneau or Louis, he is nevertheless entitled to a high place among illustrious French physicians of all time, owing to his important contributions to cardiology and neurology. Jean Baptiste Bouillaud was born on September 16, 1796, at Bragette, a hamlet near AngoulAme, where his parents owned a tileworks. He received a good education at the Angoul6me lyc6e, where he was awarded the prix d'exceUlence, or first prize in the school, as well as a prize for Latin verse. In those days a knowledge of Latin was more necessary for the young medical man aspiring to higher honours than it is to-day, as the thesis for the degree of agrige, or assistant professor, had to be written in Latin, while the inaugural thesis appeared in French. At the instigation and by the help of his uncle, a surgeon-major in the French army, to whose memory he subsequently dedicated his lTraite clinique des maladies du cceur in 1835, he determined to make medicine his profession and left his native village for Paris in 1814. Unlike the young Trousseau, he does not appear to have had any surgical inclinations, as Roger relates tha.t the sight of an operation in Richerand's wards at the HOpital St. Louis made him beat a precipitate retreat. He had been in Paris only a short time when his studies were interrupted by the march on Paris of the Allies, whom he made an ineffective attempt with the students of the Ecole Polytechnique to withstand at the Barri6re de Clichy. On the return from Elba of Napoleon, for whom he had a great admiration, he enlisted in a hussar regiment, but after the Corsican's final defeat he resumed his medical work in 1816. Like Bretonneau and Velpeau, Bouillaud had, as a student, a hard fight with poverty, and was an inmate of the boarding house immortalized by Balzac in Le Pere Goriot under the name of the Pension Vauquer, Bouillaud himself, as he subsequently told Lutaud, being the original of Horace Bianchon, who figures in many of Balzac's other novels. He studied under Dupuytren, attended him in his last illness, and by his special request performed the autopsy upon him. He was a fervent disciple of Broussais, upon whom he subsequently pronounced a eulogy on the inauguration of his statue, and like Laennec, assiduously attended Corvisart's lectures. He was also a pupil of Magendie, who inspired him with interest in physiological research. He became an interne in 1818, and qualified in 1823, the title of his inaugural thesis being, Essai sur le diagnostic des anevrismes de l'aorte et specialement sur les signes que fournit l'auscultation dans cette maladie.