Francois Blanchet. Vol. 1, L'etudiant et le savant (review)

Born on a farm on the south shore of the St. Lawrence river, François Blanchet (1776–1830) was descended from a family that had emigrated to La Nouvelle France from Picardy more than a century earlier. On his mother's side, he claimed a connection to the French apothecary Louis Hébert. Blanchet studied at the Quebec seminary, and by age nineteen he was apprenticed to James Fisher, a prominent doctor whose British military career had brought him to Canada. In Fisher's sphere, he met those involved with implementing public health projects, including quarantine and vaccination. From 1799 to 1801, Blanchet studied medicine at Columbia University with Samuel Latham Mitchill; he returned to Quebec without a diploma, but was widely known as a busy, accomplished physician and a politician. In 1800 and 1801 he published extensively: fourteen journal articles, mostly in English, and a remarkable book on the uses of chemistry to medicine: Recherches sur la médecine, ou l'application de la chimie à la médecine (1800). The book contains a "state-of-the art" analysis of iatrochemical preoccupations of the late eighteenth century: oxygen, caloric, acids, electricity, poisons, emetics, cathartics, and the health effects of heat, cold, comets, volcanoes, and atmosphere. Blanchet cited the leading experimenters of early French and British physiology, and illustrated his work with charming references to classical mythology—Pandora, Hercules, and Prometheus make appearances—and with his own experiences of cold and goiter (among other things) in agricultural Quebec.

Stéphane Castonguay and Camille Limoges give us an annotated edition of this book, accompanied by two meticulously researched, introductory chapters on Blanchet's early life and his medical philosophy. They contend that his Recherches was the first scientific treatise ever published by a Canadian-born author. In its emphasis on chemistry applied to medicine, the book was not especially original; however, the editors convincingly demonstrate its significance as an "event" in the history of Canada and of science and medicine.

At the moment when Antoine Fourcroy and M. F. X. Bichat were drafting their own, far more famous works in Paris, this young French Canadian, educated by anglophone doctors in both Canada and the United States, chose to side with the recently executed French aristocrat Antoine Lavoisier on the importance of oxygen and caloric in the explanation of life. With youthful aplomb, he cast his opinions freely, attacking vitalism and arguing against his own professor, Mitchill, on the role (and name) of nitrogen. It seems that Blanchet arrived in New York City with the work nearly completed, because it was printed at the end of his first year there. Impressively bilingual, he kept up a lively correspondence "en français" with his teacher, Fisher, to whom the book was dedicated; some of these letters became journal articles and one, on the treatment of yellow fever, was incorporated into the book. Blanchet expressed his hopes for a positive reception (and sales) in Europe in poignant letters to an editor back home. In the end, he may have been disappointed: Castonguay and Limoges found only two American reviews, and three from Europe (all in German). By the 1820s, Blanchet was already being described by his younger colleagues as an inadequately lauded founder of scientific medicine in Canada.

Using many archives and a wealth of published sources, the authors have thoroughly researched their subject from several angles: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Quebec social history, pedagogic history, and the history of medicine and physiology. In order to trace the origin of Blanchet's ideas, they tracked down lecture notes of his teachers in both Quebec and New York. A scholar's dream, their work is amplified with more than a hundred pages of notes (many discursive), thirty-five pages of bibliography, and nearly twenty pages of index.

Six pages of the notes (pp. 237–43) are devoted to proving that the Recherches and its author...