Who was the Red Dean?

The man who is the topic of this neurognostics question and answer is Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881). Interestingly, in most studies on Bouillaud, his first name is JeanBaptiste, but he himself used “J. Bouillaud” in various publications, for instance, in his book on fevers from 1826 (see Fig. 1), suggesting that in reality he was called Jean. He played an important role in the discussion on localization of function in the nineteenth century. Although he is well known, there are remarkably few biographical studies on him. An extensive eulogy was presented in the Académie de Médecine by Jules Bergeron (1853–1919), permanent secretary of the Académie, and was published in its annals in 1887. He pointed to the significance of Bouillaud’s work and the nobility of his character. Abbot J.-D. Matkosky (1882) provided many details about Bouillaud’s life in the region where he was born. Perhaps the most complete biography in English is that of John Davy Rolleston (1873–1946), published in 1931 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in England. Bouillaud (see Fig. 2) was born on September 16, 1796, at Bragette, a village near the city of Angoulême, about 130 km northeast of Bordeaux in France. In 1814, he went to Paris for his medical studies, but, abhorred by the sight of operations, he quickly quit and enlisted as a hussar, having great admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in June 1815, Bouillaud resumed his medical studies in Paris. He was a student and close friend of Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835) and also a student of François Magendie (1783–1855). He became an intern in 1818 and finished his studies with a thesis titled Essai sur le diagnostic des anévrismes de l’aorte et spécialement sur les signes que fournit l’auscultation dans cette maladie [Essay on the diagnosis of aneurysms of the aorta and especially on the signs that provides auscultation in this disease] (Bouillaud, 1823). He started his career as an assistant to René-JosephHyacinthe Bertin (1757–1828) at the Hôpital Cochin, also helping him with the publication of his book on heart diseases in 1824: Traité des maladies du coeur et des gros vaisseaux [Treatise on diseases of the heart and the large vessels]. He married in 1824. At the relatively young age of 30, he was elected in 1826 as member of the Académie de Médecine. In 1831, he was appointed to the chair of clinical medicine at the Hôpital de la Charité in Paris and soon enjoyed the reputation of an outstanding clinician. Many students followed his courses that were published in 1837 in