Name Julien-Joseph Virey | ||
 | ||
Died 9 March 1846 (aged 70), Paris Similar André Levret, François Mauriceau, Ignaz Semmelweis | ||
Julien-Joseph Virey (21 December 1775, Langres – 9 March 1846) was a French naturalist and anthropologist.
Contents
Biography
Julien-Joseph Virey grew up in Hortes village in southern high Marne, France, where he had access to a library. He educated himself and became an apprentice to his uncle, a pharmacist. Arriving in Paris, he attended the League of Ideologues and Human Observers.
He later studied medicine and became a medical doctor. After becoming a protégé of Antoine Parmentier (1737-1813), he wrote a major work quickly in the field of anthropology, in which he promoted the theory of polygeny. Virey was interested in the origin of the human races. He wrote the Natural History of Man (1801), which was reprinted in a new edition in 1824. Virey addressed these issues for a long time. The 20th-century scientists Paul Broca and Armand de Quatrefages rank him among the precursors of a style of anthropological questioning, without agreeing with all his ideas.
He was a polygenist minimalist, proposing two human species (the "White" and "Black"). He was part of one of the central controversies in science in 1820-1830, related to the origin and age of man. Georges Cuvier, Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, Louis Antoine Desmoulins and Virey all struggled to determine the origin and age of man.
Most of Virey's work and personal contributions relate to pharmaceutical science and technology. He participated in the reissue of the works of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788 ) with Charles-Nicolas-Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751-1812).
In 1821 he published a book entitled History of Morals and the Interests of Animals, in which, far from Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and especially in opposition to Descartes, he passed from discussing the "animal soul" to proposing "intelligence in animals". He studied in libraries and wrote a quantity of books and impressive articles.