Théophraste Renaudot

Théophraste Renaudot was a French physician, philanthropist and journalist who lived from 1586 to 1653. Born in Loudun, he took a doctorate of medicine at the University of Montpellier in 1606. After meeting Cardinal Richelieu he was called to Paris, where he became physician and councillor to Louis XIII, and he converted to Catholicism having been born a Protestant. Richelieu made him commissary general of the poor and later general overseer of the poor, and in that role he began a system of free medical consultations for poor patients in 1640, published a self-diagnostic handbook in 1642 that is described as the first French treatise on diagnosis, and opened a free dispensary. His new remedies and his charity angered the Paris medical faculty, whose leading voices, Guy Patin among them, held to bloodletting and purging, and after the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII he lost his permission to practise medicine in Paris. He is also remembered for founding the first weekly newspaper in France, La Gazette, in 1631, for an employment bureau, and for the first pawnshop in Paris, and he served as Historiographer Royal to Louis XIV.