Joseph Barsalou (physician)

Joseph Barsalou (1600–1660) was a French apothecary and physician.

Biography

Joseph Barsalou was born in Agen in the south west of France. He came from a family of apothecaries that was originally from Narbonne. Joseph Barsalou received no formal medical training. His father handed down his knowledge of herbs and minerals. It is through his friendship with the Scaliger family that Joseph Barsalou gained access to the library of Julius Caesar Scaliger and his son Joseph Justus Scaliger. Julius Caesar Scaliger was a physician, philosopher and commentator of Aristotle.^[1] His son Josephus Justus Scaliger was a scholar, linguist and historian. Joseph Barsalou built on his traditional knowledge of herbs with an introduction to medicine and philosophy reading Galen, Aristotle and Pythagoras.

Agen in the early 17th century was at the crossroads of the religious debate revolving around the new

As a physician Joseph Barsalou treated people in and around the town of Agen. With the many political and religious battles being fought nearby the region was rife with disease: tuberculosis, typhus, scurvy and other fevers. Many physicians actually died from being in contact with the patients they treated. Joseph Barsalou survived. Locally his reputation was built as much on treating others as surviving the contact with so many instances of disease. It testified to his skills as a physician.

Through his travels in the south of France he became acquainted with Philippe Jacques de Maussac, President of the Court of Montpellier. They remained close friends during their lives exchanging a number of letters.^[3] It is believed that it is Philippe Jacques de Maussac who introduced Joseph Barsalou to Antonio Barberini and the Italian leg of his journey.

In 1640 Joseph Barsalou was asked to treat Antonio Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII and the Legate of Avignon who suffered from a fever on a visit to Avignon in the south of France. As Antonio Barberini's health was restored, he insisted on keeping Barsalou as his personal physician and took him to Paris and Rome.

During his time with Antonio Barberini, Barsalou was introduced to Charles Bouvard who had been physician of King

Barsalou's practice he combined the traditional knowledge and methods of his forefathers that has been enhanced through trial and error over generations and is influenced by Alchemical practice.[6] He knew of the classical Greek medical texts, applying Galen's principles such as bloodletting. Later, he was stimulated to rethink his approach through his contact with the Florentine scientists and their modern experimental practice.

During his years in Florence, Barsalou's ideas developed rapidly. He wrote to his friend Charles Bouvard about the experiments he carried out to create new elixirs. He tried to understand the healing properties of plants, minerals and metals. He perhaps found his inspiration in a broad range of ideas that circulate at the time, from the alchemical texts of Jabir to Fibonacci's work on numbers and Pythagorean principles amongst many others. In his letters he explained how he tried to understand the power of plants through numbers.

Despite this, Joseph Barsalou was not an alchemist: there is no reference in his letters to a quest for the philosopher's stone or the transmutation of metal into gold.^[7]

Apart from the letters to Charles Bouvard and de Maussac no compendium of his work survived him. A professional instinct for secrecy, maybe the fear of persecution from the Church or just the fact that many similar writings were perceived as alchemy and therefore often associated with charlatans, might have determined his decision not to write down the recipes of his elixirs, let alone publish his work.

References

Footnotes