Théophraste Renaudot (1586–1653)

Gilles de la Tourette had a passion for the history of medicine and ideas, with a particular attachment to the city of Loudun, where his family had its roots. In 1884, he published a biography of another Loudun native, Théophraste Renaudot, a seventeenth-century physician who advocated reform in medical studies, calling into question the rigid scholastic method, limited to Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, in order to develop truly clinical practices as well as medical research. This chapter presents this biography and its genesis, Gilles de la Tourette’s hidden debt to Eugène Hatin, and unpublished letters received by Gilles de la Tourette after the book’s publication. Drawing on archival documents, the process Gilles de la Tourette initiated to erect a Renaudot statue in Paris and Loudun is detailed, as is his induction into the Ordre de la Légion d’honneur.