François Leuret

François Leuret was a French anatomist and psychiatrist, a native of Nancy, born on 29 December 1797 and died on 5 January 1851. He studied medicine under Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol and later became chief physician at the Bicêtre in Paris. Two of his better known students were Paul Broca and Louis Pierre Gratiolet. He was chief editor of the Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale, an influential journal of hygiene and forensic medicine. With Gratiolet he did extensive topographic mapping of the folds and fissures of the cerebral cortex in comparative brain anatomy, and he coined the name fissure of Rolando for what is now called the central sulcus. In psychiatry he stressed a rational and humane approach to treating the mentally ill, held that the origins of mental illness were unknown, and was scornful of phrenology.