Henri-Étienne Beaunis

[1] His mother, who was married to a government employee, had to leave Rouen when the city became threatened by the July revolution.

He served in Algeria many times and came back to France with the title of médecin-major de deuxième classe in 1860.

[1] His work Anatomie générale et physiologie du système lymphatique was presented as a thesis for his aggrégation de médecine in anatomical and physiological sciences.

[1] Five years after he became professor at Strasbourg, he published a book called Nouveaux éléments d'anatomie descriptive et d'embryologie with his colleague Abel Bouchard, who was also a medic in the army.

[3] Beaunis wrote the sections on osteology, articulations, myology, viscera, senses, the human body in general, and embryology.

In 1870 and 1871, Beaunis underwent the Franco-Prussian War which led to the French side losing a part of Alsace-Lorraine.

In 1871, he published in the Gazette médicale de Paris extracts of his diary describing his life during this period and more specifically during the Siege of Strasbourg.

[4] He described the intellectual climate that was developing before the war and the progressive opening to scientific dialogs both in Germany and France, especially in the fields of physiology and medicine.

After his involvement as a medic, the Faculty of Medicine of Strasbourg was transferred to Nancy, where he obtained the chair of Physiology, following the disappearance of E. Küss, who was the previous holder.

[8] Since the publication of Nouveaux Élements de physiologie humaine, Beaunis had demonstrated his interest in including psychological processes in the general field of physiology.

[10] This collective work is called Recherches expérimentales sur les conditions de l'activité cérébrale et sur la physiologie des nerfs and describes some of the works of Albert Küss, Albert René, Maxime Drouot, Charles Mayard and Eugène Gley.

The majority of these works had been published in the Revue médicale de l'Est or the Gazette des hôpitaux.