THEODORE TRONCHIN: 1 A FASHIONABLE 



FRENCH PHYSICIAN OF THE 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



By Carroll E. Edson 



When the great Boerhaave was on his deathbed he said to a friend 

 and former favorite pupil who, weeping, expressed the hope that he 

 would yet be spared, "You must not forget, dear friend, that opinion 

 rules the world. When Sylvius de la Boe died, his loss was thought 

 irreparable: two years later he was already forgotten: it will be the 

 same with me, and it must be so." 



Boerhaave is to most of us only a name. The friend to whom he 

 spoke and who became his successor in European fame, who enjoyed 

 a clientele as great as, if not greater than his master's, is almost unknown. 

 Yet he was a giant in his day, and wrought mightily. 



Theodore Tronchin was born in Geneva on May 24, 1709, the son 

 of a banker, descended from a Protestant family of Provence, which 

 had sought asylum in the freedom of Switzerland. He received a 

 liberal education in the college and academy of his native city, and was 

 studying theology when the collapse of Law's gigantic bubble brought 

 financial ruin on his father. The lad was thereupon sent to England 

 to the protection of Lord Bolingbroke, a distant relative by marriage. 

 For several years he enjoyed the advantage of the brilliant society at 

 Dawley, where Pope and Swift made with Bolingbroke the triad of an 

 intellectual and worldly galaxy. 



Deciding upon the study of medicine, he went to Cambridge, to 

 which university the foundation of Caius and Gonville College long 

 attracted the medical scholarship of England. While here he read 

 Boerhaave's treatise on chemistry, which so captivated him that he 

 determined forthwith to go to Leyden to study under the great teacher. 

 On his way he tarried for a while in London, where he met Mead, the 



1 TlUodore Tronchin (1709-81) d'apris des documents inedits; par Henry Tronchin. Paris: 

 Librairie Plon, 1906. 



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