Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy

Antoine François Comte de Fourcroy ( born June 15, 1755 in Paris, † December 17, 1809 ) was a French physician, chemist and politician.

Life

Antoine François Comte de Fourcroy was the son of a pharmacist Jean Michel de Fourcroy (1710-1783), who worked in the house of the Duke of Orléans ( see Louis-Philippe of France ( 1773-1850 ) ). His mother was Jeanne Laugier († 1762). He had two sisters, Jeanne Adélaïde de Fourcroy (1747-1819) and Louise Denise de Fourcroy ( 1750-1824 ). His mother died when he was seven years old.

De Fourcroy left the Collège d' Harcourt in Paris at the age of fifteen years and was clerk in a law firm office.

The anatomist Félix Vicq d' Azyr (1748-1794) persuaded de Fourcroy father, Faculté de médecine allow him to study at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. He studied medicine in Paris, among others, at Vicq d' Azyr, and received his doctorate in spite of great financial difficulties on September 28 in 1780. A request for free promotion was denied. Theme of the Dissertatio medica was De usu et abusu chemiae in medendo.

As a student he showed great skill in chemistry and had the opportunity in the private laboratory of Jean -Baptiste- Michel Bucquet (1746-1780), his tutor was to work and to be trained. In the period 1783-1787, the study of chemistry followed at the Ecole d' Alfort vétérinaire. Georges- Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788) appointed him in 1784 as professor of chemistry at the Jardin du Roi ( Muséum national d' histoire see naturelle). AF de Fourcroy was finally independent courses with a total of seventy published lectures, Leçons élémentaires d' histoire naturelle et de Chimie (Paris, 1782 ), also from 1782 to 1784 he was a summer course in materia medica. In all his lectures AF de Fourcroy emphasized the relationship between chemistry and natural history, and their use and importance in medicine. One of his graduate students was significant Louis -Nicolas Vauquelin ( 1763-1829 ).

After the 9th Thermidor, he became a member of the Committee of the Comité de salut public. In 1795 he was elected to the council of elders Le Conseil des Anciens, but took 1798 his teaching career in chemistry again. Napoleon Bonaparte appointed him to the Council of State and familiar to him in 1801 for the overall management of public instruction to. 1808, the earldom, he was awarded comte, the following year he died of a stroke. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, 11th Division.

Scientific achievements

However, field work in natural history are known from this time, he led an inventory by means of a detailed report on the insects of the Paris region, which he published under the heading Entomologia parisiensis (Paris, 1785 ). Also from this period are some researches on the anatomy of the muscles known, but he had concentrated in the more distant future on the chemistry.

In 1792 he sat as a member of the Committee of the introduction of the equality of weights and measures and was also on the committee of public instruction and in the section of the working poor.

1794 Member of the National Convention and in the period from 1802 to 1808 he is Minister of Education. In 1787 he published a treatise on the methods of chemical nomenclature, Chimique la Méthode de nomenclature together with Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau ( 1737-1816 ), Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier ( 1743-1794 ) and Claude -Louis Berthollet ( 1748-1822 ).

In 1785 a metallurgical treatise on the bell metal, Recherches sur le métal of cloches. Louis -Nicolas Vauquelin was his assistant from 1783 to 1791 there appeared Vauquelin publications as the beginning of his superiors, later making note of both names.

Works

His main works are:

• Fourcroy, AF de: De usu et abusu chemiae in medendo. Parisiis Quillau, (1779 )
• Fourcroy, AF de: Leçons élémentaires d' histoire naturelle et de chimie (Paris 1781, 2 vols, 1791, 5 vols, under the title:
• Système et de leurs the connaissances chimiques applications aux phénomènes de la nature et de l'art, Paris 1801, 6 vols; German in the extract of F. Wals, Königsberg 1801-1803, 4 vols ); by Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, Guyton de Morveau Claude Louis Berthollet and

• Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique (Paris 1787), German method of chemical nomenclature for the antiphlogistic system of Morveau, Lavoisier, Berthollet and Fourcroy de. Nachdr d ed Vienna 1793, ISBN 3-487-06450-2.
• La Médecine éclairée par les sciences physiques, ou Journal des découvertes relative aux différentes parties de l'art de Guerineau (Paris 1791-1792, 4 vols );
• Philosophy Chimique (Paris 1792; 3rd Edition, das. 1806; German as Chemical philosophy or fundamental truths of modern chemistry: .. Sorted on a new type of AF Fourcroy Translated from the French by Johann Samuel Traugott Gehler Leipzig 1796);
• Tableaux de synoptiques chimie (Paris 1805; German as Synoptic tables over the entire circumference of chemistry: a guide for lectures on this science in the schools of Paris, by Gorres, Koblenz 1802).

His works are mostly come out in German translation and were repeatedly issued as reprints.