Tissot

The Author: Antoinette Emch-Dériaz is on the History Faculty at the University of Mississippi. A native of Geneva, Switzerland, she received her Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Rochester. She has written several articles on diverse eighteenth-century medical topics and physicians. Dr. Emch-Dériaz has also contributed chapters to books on the history of medicine. She is now editing the forty-year correspondence between S.A. Tissot and J.G. Zimmermann.

Tissot was one of the most innovative medical men of the Enlightenment: a Rousseauvian critic of the ills of civilization, a popularizer of 'medicine for the people', a pioneer of sexual maladies. Till now, he has never found a scholarly biographer and interpreter. This original, comprehensive and fluent biography of Tissot meets that need. Historians of medicine will be deeply indebted to Dr. Antoinette Emch-Deriaz's admirable study. (R.S. Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine) In this thoughtful and insightful book, Antoinette Emch-Deriaz provides a fascinating picture of the career of one of the leading eighteenth-century physicians and illuminates the development and logic of eighteenth-century medicine as a whole. Especially admirable are the ways in which she charts Tissot's turn toward a 'social' taxonomy of health that linked specific medical problems to the groups of people affected by them. Anchoring the general debates in the illuminating specifics of medical training and practice from the treatment of individual patients to the organization of hospitals, she lays bare the texture and dynamics of intellectual and cultural change. (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Emory University) Emch-Deriaz' biography of Tissot finally gives us a full-length and well-rounded portrait of the Swiss doctor who embodied all the qualities and interests that make the Enlightenment such an attractive epoch for the modern reader. This is a work of thorough scholarship that blends the history of science and medicine with the social and political context. This biography will be essential reading for scholars, students and the interested lay public. (Dora B. Weiner, University of California, Los Angeles) Heretofore, Tissot has been without a reputable biography; Emch-Deriaz has filled that gap with her well-researched, thoughfully argued study of a neglected 18th-century intellectual. (R.O. Lindsay, Choice) It is amazing that a figure of such importance has had to wait

"Tissot was one of the most innovative medical men of the Enlightenment: a Rousseauvian critic of the ills of civilization, a popularizer of 'medicine for the people', a pioneer of sexual maladies. Till now, he has never found a scholarly biographer and interpreter. This original, comprehensive and fluent biography of Tissot meets that need. Historians of medicine will be deeply indebted to Dr. Antoinette Emch-Dériaz's admirable study." (R.S. Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine)
"In this thoughtful and insightful book, Antoinette Emch-Dériaz provides a fascinating picture of the career of one of the leading eighteenth-century physicians and illuminates the development and logic of eighteenth-century medicine as a whole. Especially admirable are the ways in which she charts Tissot's turn toward a 'social' taxonomy of health that linked specific medical problems to the groups of people affected by them. Anchoring the general debates in the illuminating specifics of medical training and practice from the treatment of individual patients to the organization of hospitals, she lays bare the texture and dynamics of intellectual and cultural change." (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Emory University)
"Emch-Dériaz' biography of Tissot finally gives us a full-length and well-rounded portrait of the Swiss doctor who embodied all the qualities and interests that make the Enlightenment such an attractive epoch for the modern reader. This is a work of thorough scholarship that blends the history of science and medicine with the social and political context. This biography will be essential reading for scholars, students and the interested lay public." (Dora B. Weiner, University of California, Los Angeles) "Heretofore, Tissot has been without a reputable biography; Emch-Dériaz has filled that gap with her well-researched, thoughfully argued study of a neglected 18th-century intellectual." (R.O. Lindsay, Choice)
"It is amazing that a figure of such importance has had