Louis Duret

Louis Duret (1527 to 1586) was a French physician, chief physician to Charles IX of France and then to his brother Henry III. Born at Bage la Ville in the province of Bresse, then belonging to the Duke of Savoy, into a family of minor nobility, he left his father's home as a teenager and lived in poverty until, at about nineteen, he went to Paris. There a private tutor, the magistrate Achilles Harlay, trained him in the languages of medicine, Latin, Greek and Arabic, and Duret was said to have a photographic memory and to have known all the works of Hippocrates by heart. He studied medicine under Jacques Houllier and Jacques Dubois, soon obtained a post at the Collège de France and became a professor there, teaching at the college for eighteen years. Philosophically he was firmly attached to Hippocrates and the Hippocratic oath, and so esteemed that Henry III granted him a pension of four hundred gold crowns and attended his daughter's wedding in 1586. His Adversaria on the practical works of Jacques Houllier appeared in 1571, and his unpublished commentary on Hippocrates, finished and published by his son Jean Duret, is his most famous work. He died in Paris in January 1586.