Jean-Nicolas Corvisart-Desmarets (15 February 1755 – 18 September 1821) was a French medical doctor.

Born in the village of Dricourt (now in Ardennes), Corvisart studied from 1777 at the Ecole de Médecine in Paris, later qualifying as docteur régent of the Faculté de Paris (1782). In 1797, Corvisart began to teach at the Collège de France, where he gained a reputation as an expert in cardiology. Among his students were René Laennec, Guillaume Dupuytren, Xavier Bichat and Pierre Bretonneau.

Corvisart resurrected percussion during the French Revolution after it had fallen out of fashion. He emphasized the study of symptoms and examined postmortem evidence as well. In 1808 Corvisart's translation of Leopold von Auenbrugg's Inventum Novum from Latin into French was published. Corvisart was especially fond of Auenbrugg's use of chest percussion as a diagnostic tool, and began to perfect the technique. In the meantime, Corvisart had become since 1804 the primary physician of Napoléon Bonaparte, who he would continue to attend to until Bonaparte's exile to St. Helena Island, October 1815. In 1820 he was made a member of Académie Nationale de Médecine. He died the following year at Courbevoie. His father, Pierre Corvisart, was an attorney for the Parlement of Paris. He moved to Dricourt when the Parliament dissolved, but returned to Paris after the birth of his son, who he destined to be a fellow lawyer.

To his peers, Corvisart was known to be stocky in stature, vigorous in manner, outspoken, honest, generous to the poor, and not afraid to defy tradition. Napoleon also often adopted a casual tone and joked with Corvisart, asking him questions such as, "how many patients are you going to kill to-day?", to which Corvisart responded "Not many, Sire". The prisoners, Mr. William Thomas Williams and Dr. Wickham, were friends of Jenner, and Jenner held esteem for them as educated men. As Portal became more influential in the French medical scene, he attracted the attention of Corvisart, who would not permit him to engage with the Imperial family, out of a deep dislike. Within this time period, medical practitioners commonly believed the natural state of the human body was consistent health, unless faced with an unknown catalyst. It was thought that the body naturally should be in a healthy state and that an unhealthy body was a result of either an imbalance or a pathogenic cause. Corvisart's belief in individual variation challenged this assumption. He postulated that the reason for disease was due to the body's individuality, rather than its generalized consistency. The individual's susceptibility to pathogen was "an outcome of heredity and prenatal development", and uncontrollable by regimented living. While his attention to patient-specific diagnosis was already a part of Paris medicine, Corvisart's approach accepted varied clusters of symptoms for any disease, rather than a set checklist determining how the disease must manifest. A disease could be asymptomatic, but the presence of structural change indicated illness regardless of whether the patient manifested symptoms or not. This medical understanding was supplemented by "lesions" found in the organs of asymptomatic corpses during anatomical dissection. Either acute or chronic illnesses were caused by the body's constitutional make-up and its weakened ability to fight against the specific disease. In essence, disease was caused by an organ's weakness.

Corvisart attention to pathological anatomy and belief in organic disease shifted the focus of medicine away from observation of the patient and the patient's symptoms. Autopsy became a strong force in Paris medical know-how. Physical examination began to take precedence, although internal examinations were impossible. Although the aforementioned lesions were common in most corpses, Corvisart and his contemporaries shifted medicine towards the clinical and physical ways that disease affects the body and away from the patient narrative. This change also represented a segue from therapeutic medicine to diagnostic medicine, which banked on the premise that a cure would always be present for whatever diagnosis was available. His commentary on Auenbrugger's original text extended its length four times. This method of percussion had a resurgence under Corvisart's translation and became an intrinsic aspect of clinical medicine. In particular, Corvisart attentively focused on the heart and lungs as sources of lesions. Corvisart, Laennec and others also headed the so-called "Paris school" that developed new methods of medicine in the twenty hospitals of Paris. By establishing a monetary clinical teaching school at Hôpital de la Charité, Corvisart and his peers codified a current institution of medical training.

Corvisart's original work consists of Essai sur les maladies du cœur (1806), and has many other commentaries on other medical tracts.

Selected writings

  • Cours élémentaire de matière médicale: suivi d'un précis de l'art de formuler, Volume 1 (with Louis Desbois de Rochefort) 1793 - Basic course of materia medica.
  • Essai sur les maladies et les lésions organiques du cœur et des gros vaisseaux, 1806 (with C. E. Horeau), translated into English by Jacob Gates as " An essay on the organic diseases and lesions of the heart and great vessels" (1812).
  • Nouvelle methode pour reconnaitre les maladies internes de la poitrine par la percussion de cette cavité, 1808 - New method to recognize diseases of the internal chest by percussion of the cavity, (French translation of Leopold Auenbrugger's Latin book on medical percussion).

See also

  • History of medicine in France

Notes

References

  • Journal List >Heart >v.78(1); Jul 1997 >PMC484851 Jean Nicolas Corvisart (1755–1821). M. K. Davies and A. Hollman
  • Biographie des célébrités militaires des armées de terre et de mer de 1789 à 1850/C