Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (born Sept. 16, 1796, Garat, Fr.—died Oct. 29, 1881, Paris) was a French physician and medical researcher who was the first to establish clinically that the centre of speech is located in the anterior lobes of the brain. He was also the first to differentiate between loss of speech resulting from the inability to create word forms and remember them and that resulting from the inability to control the movements involved in speech. Bouillaud further made important contributions in cardiology, establishing the connection between the occurrence of heart disease and acute articular rheumatism. He helped explain the mechanism and significance of the normal heart sounds and was the first to describe several abnormal heart sounds and pulse rhythms. He was among the first to recognize the value of the drug digitalis as “the opium of the heart.”

Bouillaud’s medical education was interrupted when he joined Napoleon’s army during the Hundred Days (1815), but he returned to study in Paris after Waterloo. His rise to prominence was rapid. He became a professor of clinical medicine at the Charité in Paris in 1831, publishing an important book about the diseases of the heart four years later and another about rheumatism and the heart the following year. He was the first to accurately describe endocardium and endocarditis and introduced these terms for them into medicine.

Not all of his theories were medically sound. Sometimes called “the last of the great blood-letters,” he favoured rapid bleeding as treatment for fever. Nevertheless, Bouillaud was an able diagnostician.