Charles-Augustin Vandermonde

Charles-Augustin Vandermonde was a French physician, writer and editor, born in Macao in 1727 and dead in 1762 at the age of 34. His father, a doctor of medicine from Reims, had gone to the Far East in the service of the French East India Company and worked as a doctor in Macao from 1723; after the death of his mother the boy and his father returned to Paris in 1732. He became a doctor of medicine at the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1750. In 1756 he published the Essai sur la maniere de perfectionner lespece humaine, arguing that humans could be improved by applying the principles of animal breeding to them. He edited one of the first medical periodicals, the Recueil periodique dobservations de medecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, later the Journal de medecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, and in 1759 anonymously published the popular Dictionnaire portatif de sante.