Charles Bouvard

Charles Bouvard (1572 to 1658), born at Montoire, was a French chemist and physician who served as physician to King Louis XIII, succeeding Jean Heroard, and as superintendent of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The son of a physician from his native town who taught him his profession in earliest childhood but died while Bouvard was small, he was left an orphan and brought up by Marin Liberge, a professor at the university of Angers, where he took his doctorate in 1604. Soon afterwards he came to Paris and became a professor at the Collège Royal. He was known for using his knowledge of plants to prepare medicines from common flowers, and the evergreen herb and shrub genus Bouvardia is the flower most closely associated with him. In 1655 he wrote the Historicae Hodiernae Medicinae Rationalis Veritatis, a book defending medical rationalism. He was a close friend of the physician Joseph Barsalou, with whom he corresponded on medicine and on treating patients with plants.