Augustin Jacob Landré-Beauvais

Augustin Jacob Landré-Beauvais (1772 to 1840) was a French surgeon whose name is attached to the first modern-day account of rheumatoid arthritis. Born in Orléans, he studied in Paris under Pierre-Joseph Desault and Xavier Bichat and, from 1792, in Lyon under Marc-Antoine Petit. In 1796 he obtained an internship at the Salpêtrière Hospital, where he assisted Philippe Pinel, and in 1799 he was appointed professor of clinical medicine there. After the Restoration he also held a professorship at the Paris polytechnic school, but he was removed from his post in 1830 at the insistence of King Louis-Philippe. His description of the disease, which he took for a form of gout, is now regarded as the earliest modern account, although earlier physicians had already suspected that the condition might be distinct from gout. The name rheumatoid arthritis itself was coined later, in 1859, by Alfred Baring Garrod. His other preserved work, Séméiotique, ou traité des signes des maladies, first published in 1809, treats the physical signs of illness in general.