Napoleon philippe pinel biography
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Philippe Pinel
Origin: Pinel was born in Saint-André, in the Tarn department in southern France. He was the son of Philippe Francois Pinel a barber-surgeon.
His mother, Élisabeth Dupuy, came from a family that had produced a number of physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons. He had two brothers Charles and Pierre-Louis, who became physicians.
Education: Pinel’s early education, first at the Collège de Lavaur and then at the Collège de l’Esquille in Toulouse, was an essentially literary one.
During the school year, he was greatly influenced by the encyclopaedists, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Later having decided upon a career in religion, he enrolled in the Faculty of Theology at Toulouse in July 1767. However, in April 1770, he left it for the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toulouse, from which he received his M.D. on December 21, 1773.
He received his doctorate and in 1774 continued his medical education at the University of Montp
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Pinel, Philippe
(b. Jonquieres, near Castres, France, 20 April 1745; d. Paris, France, 25 October 1826)
medicine.
Pinel was the son of a master surgeon who practiced in St.-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, a village between Castres and Toulouse. His mother, Élisabeth Dupuy, came from a family that had since the seventeenth century produced a number of physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons. Despite this medical heritage, Pinel’s early education, first at the College de Lavaur and then at the College de l’ Esquille in Toulouse, was an essentially literary one; he was greatly influenced by the Encyclopedists, particularly Rousseau. Having decided upon a career in religion, he enrolled in the Faculty of Theology at Toulouse in July 1761; in April 1770, however, he left it for the Faculty of Medicine, from which he received the M.D. on 21 December 1773. Simultaneously with his medical training, Pinel studied mathematics, an interest that is apparent in his medical writings.
In 1774 Pinel we
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The Wrong Head
‘Scarcely one year has gone by, and everything has taken on a new countenance.’ Early in the French Revolution, in 1790, Philippe Pinel observed the ‘salutary effects of the progress of liberty’ everywhere he looked. During the Ancien Régime he had seen Paris as an incubator for madness; now he recognised the epidemic of nervous illnesses that had plagued it as symptoms of a ‘social order ready to expire’. The national mind was flooded with vigour, ‘as though bygd some electric virtue, the struktur of nerves and muscles of a new life’. Everywhere in the newly energised city he heard people saying: ‘I feel better since the revolution.’
The Revolution was the making of Pinel as it was of the French medical profession, which for the first time became a significant arm of the state. He had previously been a struggling but ambitious provincial doctor with a special interest in madness: by 1793 he wa