Jean-Baptiste de Sénac

Jean-Baptiste de Sénac (1693 to 1770) was a French physician born in the district of Lombez in Gascony. Details of his early life are sketchy, but it is generally thought that he studied medicine at the University of Leiden, and he later studied in London, where John Freind was one of his instructors. From 1723 he practised medicine in Paris, and from 1752 to 1770 he served as personal physician to King Louis XV. He is remembered for important studies of the heart at a time when cardiology was rudimentary. In 1749 he published Traité de la structure du coeur, de son action, et de ses maladies, an influential treatise that dealt systematically with the physiological, anatomical and pathological questions of the heart, drawing on disorders he analysed himself and on diagnoses by other physicians. Many of his discoveries came from autopsies. He was the first physician to describe the link between atrial fibrillation and mitral valve disease and the first to make a comprehensive study of cardiac hypertrophy, and he researched cinchona extract and rhubarb as treatments for cardiac irregularities. His son was Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan.