Symphorien Champier

Symphorien Champier (1471 to 1539) was a physician and writer from Lyon, born in Saint-Symphorien in France. He took his doctorate in medicine at Montpellier and served as personal physician to Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, whom he followed to Italy with Louis XII. He then settled in Lyon, where he worked alongside François Rabelais, who mocked him in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Champier founded the College of the Doctors of Lyon, served as an alderman and helped establish the School of the Doctors of Lyon. Lyon was then the greatest producer of medical books in France, and he published widely, including against Arab medicine, which he judged a falsification of Greek science. He also wrote histories, among them the Chroniques de Savoie in 1516 and a life of Bayard in 1525, and La nef des dames vertueuses, a pro-woman tract first printed in 1503. He opposed Renaissance occultism and attacked alchemists in 1532. He died in the second half of 1539.