François-Joseph Double

He was born on 11 March 1776 in Verdun-sur-Garonne, Tarn-et-Garonne, France.[4] His family, the Double family, had been ennobled in 1378.[3] His grandfather and father were both Apothecaries.[4] He studied in Montpellier, where he was taught in Latin.[4] He moved to Paris in 1803.[4]

He started his career as an apothecary in Paris.[4] He served as a physician in the French-Spanish War of 1793.[4]

As a physician, he developed the accurate observation of the clinical signs of illness, and studied the unaided auscultation of respiratory and cardiac ailments.[2] He also described tubal breathing and pulmonary rales or crackles.[2] He listened to the heart and focused on problems of the heartbeat and unusual sounds, but he failed to link them to any specific ailment.[2] Shortly after, René Laennec (1781-1826) invented the stethoscope and developed aided auscultation.[2] He wrote two books and many reports, for example about diseases like croup and cholera.[4]

In 1832 he co-founded the Académie Nationale de Médecine with Antoine Portal (1742-1832).[3] King Louis Philippe I (1773-1850), who reigned from 1830 to 1848, offered him another peerage should he renounce his medical practise, but he refused.[4]

He died on 12 June 1842 in Paris, and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

• Traité du croup (1811).
• Séméiologie générale ou traité des signes et de leur valeur dans les maladies (3 volumes, Paris, Croullebois).

• Michel Suspène, Docteur François-Joseph Double, un itinéraire médical, en hommage à l'Académie de médecine (CDDP de Tarn-et-Garonne, Montauban, 2002).