Charles Le Roy (physician)

Charles Le Roy was an eighteenth-century French physician and contributor to the Encyclopédie, born on 12 February 1726 and dead on 12 December 1779. He was the youngest of four sons of the Paris watchmaker Julien Le Roy, and his brothers included the watchmaker Pierre Le Roy, the physicist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy and the architect Julien-David Le Roy. Frail in health, he began his medical studies at Montpellier, continued in Italy and Paris, and returned to Montpellier, where he took his doctorate and became a professor of medicine, valued for the thoroughness and accuracy of his teaching. He advised the king and belonged to the Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society and the Société royale de médecine. In 1755 he sent electric current through a wire wound around the head of a blind patient, who saw vivid flashes of light but was not cured; this is regarded as the first experimental evidence that nerves could be electrically stimulated. He returned to Paris in 1777 and died two years later.