Théodore Tronchin, Doctor to the Stars
In the fashionable female circles of 18th-century Paris, a physician who recommended fresh air, exercise and looser corsets became a celebrated figure.
‘He is six-foot tall, wise as Asclepius and beautiful as Apollo.’ Thus did Voltaire describe his friend and personal doctor, the Swiss physician Théodore Tronchin, who was a specialist in women’s diseases and inoculation. His clinic attracted patients from all over the world and his reputation, especially for groundbreaking research on the prevention of smallpox through inoculation, grew so much that the Duke of Orleans, Louis-Philippe I (1725-85), summoned him to Paris to treat his children, the younger Louis-Philippe and Louise Marie Thérèse Bathilde. His success sparked interest in both him and the practice of inoculation among the Parisian aristocracy and his rise to fame meant inoculation became widespread, even if it was adopted more because of the wish to be à la mode than of a genuine desire for prevention.
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