Jean René Constant Quoy

Jean René Constant Quoy (1790 to 1869) was a French naval surgeon, zoologist and anatomist, born at Maillé and died at Rochefort. He began his medical studies at the school of naval medicine at Rochefort in 1806, served as an auxiliary surgeon on a voyage to the Antilles, took his medical doctorate at Montpellier in 1814 and was surgeon-major on a journey to Réunion. With Joseph Paul Gaimard he served as naturalist and surgeon on the Uranie under Louis de Freycinet from 1817 to 1820 and on the Astrolabe under Jules Dumont d'Urville from 1826 to 1829. In 1823 the two presented a paper arguing that reef-building polyps were confined to shallow water, work that Charles Darwin later quoted. Quoy became professor of anatomy at the Rochefort Naval School, served in naval hospitals at Toulon and Brest, and was inspector general of the Naval Bureau of Medicine and Surgery from 1848 to 1858.