Biographical Memoir of M. Philippe Pinel. 9Jdl 



the s^me time, engaged in the same work, and knew so well how 

 to get tlie start among the journalists, that M. PlnePs translation 

 was not even mentioned. Various detached papers *, an edition 

 of Baglivi -f-, and translations of foreign works, made for book- 

 sellers, were hardly more advantageous to him. Three times 

 successively he presented himself at the competitions for a gra- 

 tuitous admission into the Faculty ; three times he failed ; and, 

 to crown these severe trials, he had the mortification to be van- 

 quished by a man so much his inferior, that he himself had 

 written his doctrinal thesis ; but this booby had been physician 

 of a regiment, and had acquired boldness. He spoke with ease ; 

 while the excellent Pinel, though abounding in all kinds of 

 science, expressed himself with difficulty, and almost stammered. 

 M. Lemounier, first physician to the king, had arrived, on the 

 recommendation of his friend M. Desfontaines, to make him 

 physician to the household of Mesdames the aunts of Louis 

 XVI ; but, when he presented himself, his bashfulness made 

 him dumb ; the princesses formed an erroneous opinion of him, 

 and from this gleam of fortune too, he was obliged to with- 

 draw. His only I'esource was to place himself as physician in 

 an establishment which an individual kept for the insane ; where, 

 though the experience he acquired was afterwards the chief 

 means of his success, the pecuniary reward he received at the 

 time hardly kept him from want. So many attempts frustrated, 

 ended in reducing him to a kind of melancholy ; he shunned 

 society, and perhaps would have fallen into despair, if his 

 friend Savary, so well known from his Letters on Egypt and 

 Greece, had not in a manner taken possession of him, and in 

 various ways endeavoured to inspire him with some courage. 



At length, in 1791, a prospect less gloomy began to open : 

 the Royal Society of Medicine had offered a prize for an essay 

 on ike most effectual means of treating patients rohose under- 

 standing has become deranged. M. Pinel, whom his situation 

 had enabled closely to observe insanity, and who had observed 



• In 1780» he gave several medical articles to the Journal de Paris. At 

 a later period, he took a principal part in the editing of the Gazette de Sante; 

 he translated the medical and physiological part of the Abridgment of the 

 Philosophical Transactions. 



t Baglivi opera omnia medico-practica, novani editionem innumeris 

 purgatam, nntis illustravit et praefectus est Ph. Pinel. Paris, \^fifi. 



i'2 



