Laurent Joubert

Laurent Joubert was a French physician of the sixteenth century, born in the Dauphine in 1529 and dead in 1582. He went to Montpellier at about twenty-one to study medicine under Guillaume Rondelet, and when Rondelet died in 1556 he succeeded him as chancellor of the medical faculty there. He later served Catherine de Medici as her personal physician and became one of the physicians to Henry III of France. Joubert is best known for his two-volume Erreurs populaires of 1578, which took up common beliefs about birth, pregnancy and health, such as the notion that the moon fixes a child's sex, and answered them from his own practice. He wrote in French as well as Latin and argued that ordinary people should be able to read medical advice in their own language. He also translated the surgeon Guy de Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie into French for working surgeons.