Name Pierre Olive | Role Physician | |
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Died September 10, 1867, Paris, France Education Ecole pratique des hautes etudes |
Pierre François Olive Rayer (8 March 1793 – 10 September 1867) was a French physician who was a native of Saint Sylvain. He made important contributions in the fields of pathological anatomy, physiology, comparative pathology and parasitology.
Contents
Biography
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He studied medicine at Caen, and afterwards in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and at the Hôtel-Dieu. He became an interne of medicine in 1813, and in 1818 earned his medical doctorate. Later on, he became a physician at Hôpital Saint-Antoine (1825), and at the Hôpital de la Charité (1832), and was also a consultant-physician to King Louis-Philippe. In 1862 he attained the chair of comparative anatomy at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.
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In 1837 Rayer discovered that the fatal equine disease known as glanders was contagious to other species, including humans. Between 1837 and 1841 he published a three-volume book on diseases of the kidney titled Traité des maladies des reins. In 1850 Rayer published a paper that provided the first description of the anthrax bacillus (Inoculation du sang de rate, 1850). In this work he documented studies that he performed with physician Casimir Davaine (1812-1882) in regards to Bacillus anthracis. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855.
Rayer was a member of the Académie de Médecine and the Académie des Sciences, and co-founder of the Société de biologie, of which he was also president. He maintained friendships with several influential people in France, that included naturalist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, novelist George Sand, philosopher Émile Littré, and several disciples of Henri de Saint-Simon.