Jean-André Peyssonnel

Jean-André Peyssonnel (19 June 1694, Marseille – 24 December 1759, Saint-Bertrand, Guadeloupe) was a French physician and naturalist, known for his work in marine natural history.

Peyssonnel undertook his education at the Oration College in Marseille, where he was very attentive to the history of science, and after he obtained the degree of doctor of medicine in 1718 from the University of Aix-en-Provence.

After beginning his career as a naturalist, his debut as a physician came also in 1720 during the Great Plague of Marseille, where his devotion to the sick earned him an annual royal stipend.

Named a royal physician to Guadeloupe in 1727, he soon became embroiled in some controversies over a presumed epidemic of leprosy spreading from enslaved Africans to French colonists.

He continued correspondences with French men of science about various topics that interested him: hurricanes, sea sponges, madrepores, hot springs.

He and his family lived for more than twenty years in Guadeloupe, moving soon after their arrival from the government seat of Basse-Terre in the southwest of the island to the new parish of Saint-Bertrand on the northern shores of Grande-Terre.

He also engaged in biblical exigency about whether enslaved Africans should be actively converted to Christianity and considered part of the human family--as a monogenesist, he answered yes.

René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757) first doubted this discovery, but afterwards found it convincing in his Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire des insectes.

[5] Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788), in the seventh chapter of his first Discourse on Natural History wrote that "Peyssonnel had observed and first recognized that corals came from an animal origin."

He was more fully recognized for his pathbreaking work on corals in 1778 by M. Collé who confirmed his discovery through chemical analysis and protested energetically against an article by Michel Adanson (1727-1806) in a supplement to the Encyclopédie.