Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1200

FRANçOIS EMMANUEL FODéRé (1764-1835) Über den Kropf und den Cretinismus. Bey Christian Friedrich Himburg 1796 xxxiv, 268 [2] pp. 20.5 cm.

Fodéré, a native of Savoy, received his medical degree at Turin and then continued his scientific studies in Paris. He became the first legal medical officer to the Duchy of Aosta and, when Savoy was incorporated into France in 1792, he taught physics and chemistry at Nice. He later was chief physician of the Hôtel Dieu and lunatic asylum at Marseilles. In 1814 he became professor of forensic medicine at Strasbourg where he completed his career. Fodéré lived in an area of France where goiter and cretinism were endemic and he first wrote an article on the subject in 1789. In 1792 he followed it with a book which was translated into German as the present work in 1796. Fodéré was one of several individuals whose work helped define cretinism in the eighteenth century and his work is frequently cited by authors of the nineteenth century. He provided an excellent description of the symptomatology of each disease, believed that heredity could be a factor, and recognized that there is a connection between goiter and cretinism. Fodéré did not accept an inadequate diet or drinking water as causes of goiter. He felt that one important cause of goiter was excess humidity and recommended as early therapy fresh and dry air, exposure to sunlight, and pills made from burnt marine sponges. The book has here been translated from French into German by Hermann Wilhelm Lindemann (b. ca. 1760), a Göttingen physician who translated a number of English and French medical works into German.

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 3810 (French ed., 1792); Waller 3099 (French ed., 1800); Wellcome III, p. 36