Antoine Portal

Baron Antoine Portal was a French anatomist, medical doctor and medical historian, born at Gaillac in 1742 and dead in 1832 at the age of ninety. The eldest of twelve siblings, he studied at the Jesuit college in Albi and at Toulouse, then at the medical faculty of Montpellier from 1762 to 1765. In Paris he taught anatomy to the dauphin from 1766, became professor of anatomy at the College de France in 1769 and professor of anatomy at the Jardin du Roi in 1778. Louis XVIII named him the first Doctor to the King, a post he kept under Charles X, and his close relationship with the king led to the creation of the body that became the Academie Nationale de Medecine, of which he was lifelong president. In 1803 he published Cours danatomie medicale, a five volume work on medical history, and he is credited as probably the first to describe amyloid in the liver, in 1789.