Louis Jurine

Louis Jurine was a Swiss medical doctor, surgeon and naturalist who lived in Geneva and was mainly interested in entomology. Born in 1751, he studied surgery in Paris and quickly acquired a reputation for his expertise in medicine and natural history beyond Geneva. He taught courses in anatomy and surgery at the Société des Arts and was made honorary professor of zoology at the Academy, today the University of Geneva. In 1807 he founded a maternity hospice, and he was awarded prizes for his work on the gases of the human body, the artificial feeding of infants and pectoral angina. After learning of Spallanzani's experiments with bats, he conducted a series of experiments from which he concluded that bats use sound to navigate in darkness. His collections of Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera and Hemiptera are held in the Natural History Museum of Geneva. He died in 1819.