Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud

Who was Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud?

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud was a French physician who was born in Bragette, now part of Garat, Charente. Bouillaud was an early advocate of the localization of cerebral functions, and especially of speech.

He received his medical doctorate in 1823 and later was a professor at the Charité in Paris. Puerto Rican independence leader, surgeon and Légion d'honneur laureate, Ramón Emeterio Betances, was one of his prominent students. In 1862 Bouillaud was elected president of the Académie de Médecine, and in 1868 he became a member of the Académie des sciences.

Bouillaud performed research of many medical diseases and conditions, including cancer, cholera, heart disease and encephalitis, to name a few. He is remembered for providing a correlation between rheumatism and heart disease, and French medical dictionaries still refer to acute rheumatoid endocarditis as "Bouillaud's disease". He described this condition in the treatise Traité clinique des maladies du coeur.

Bouillaud was an early practitioner of the drug digitalis for treatment of heart ailments. He referred to digitalis as the "opium of the heart". Along with cardiologist Pierre Potain he performed studies of "heart sounds" involving the differentiation between normal and abnormal heart rhythms. Bouilland was an ardent follower of François-Joseph-Victor Broussais in regards to the dubious practice of bloodletting.