Pierre Magnol

Pierre Magnol, who lived from 1638 to 1715, was a French botanist born in Montpellier, where he lived and worked for most of his life. Raised in a Calvinist family of apothecaries, he enrolled in medicine at the University of Montpellier in 1655 and took his doctorate in 1659, then devoted himself to botany and made trips through Languedoc, Provence, the Alps and the Pyrenees. Because he was Protestant he was twice denied a post at Montpellier, in 1664 and 1667, and only after converting to Catholicism following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 did he become demonstrator of plants in 1687 and professor of medicine in 1694. He directed the Royal Botanic Garden of Montpellier from 1696, was a founding member of the Société Royale des Sciences de Montpellier in 1706 and in 1709 took a seat in the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. He was the first to publish the concept of plant families as they are understood today, and his students included Tournefort and the brothers Antoine and Bernard de Jussieu.