Antoine de Jussieu

Antoine de Jussieu (1686 to 1758) was a French naturalist, botanist and physician, cited in botanical names by the author abbreviation Ant.Juss. Born in Lyon, he was the son of Christophe de Jussieu, an apothecary of some repute who wrote a Nouveau traité de la thériaque in 1708. Antoine studied at the University of Montpellier and travelled with his brother Bernard through Spain, Portugal and southern France before going to Paris in 1708, the year the botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort died, whom he succeeded at the Jardin du Roi, later the Jardin des Plantes. His own publications are of modest importance, but he edited Tournefort's Institutiones rei herbariae in three volumes in 1719 and the posthumous Plantae per Galliam, Hispaniam et Italiam observatae of Jacques Barrelier in 1714. He practised medicine, mainly among the very poor, and a posthumous work of 1772, Traité des vertus des plantes, preserves his teaching. His brother Bernard is the better known of the two.