Auguste Ambroise Tardieu

Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (1818 to 1879) was a French physician regarded as the leading forensic medical scientist of the mid-nineteenth century. The son of the mapmaker Ambroise Tardieu, he took his medical doctorate in Paris and became professor of legal medicine, dean of the Faculty of Medicine and president of the French Academy of Medicine. His specialties were forensic medicine and toxicology, and over a 23-year career he acted as expert in 5,238 cases, using them as a statistical base for more than a dozen volumes on subjects such as poisoning, hanging, drowning, suffocation and syphilis. His textbook on the legal medicine of poisoning made his reputation. He gave an early clinical description of battered children, so that battered child syndrome is also called Tardieu syndrome, and he first described the subpleural spots now called Tardieu ecchymoses in 1859. He also published studies of child labour in mines and factories. His writing on sexual offences reflects the prejudices of his time and is recorded as history, not as present medical guidance.