Sébastien Vaillant

Sébastien Vaillant (1669 to 1722) was a French botanist born at Vigny, in what is now Val d'Oise. He was collecting plants and transplanting them into his father's garden by the age of five. Sent to a boarding school at Pontoise at six, he studied with the cathedral organist there and succeeded him at eleven. He studied medicine and surgery at the Pontoise hospital, since medicine then included botany, left for Évreux at nineteen, and served as a surgeon at the battle of Fleurus in 1690. In Paris in 1691 he took Joseph Pitton de Tournefort as his master in botany, and Tournefort used his talents in writing the Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris of 1698. He also took anatomy with Joseph Guichard Duverney and chemistry with Antoine de Saint-Yon. Guy-Crescent Fagon, the king's physician and botanist, made him his secretary, gave him unlimited access to the Royal Garden and appointed him its director. The garden collections grew greatly under him, and Fagon had him furnish and guard a Cabinet of drugs there.