He was a professor at the University of Paris, and a large part of his academic career was given to an analysis of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica, of which he published a Latin translation in 1516.
Ruel's three-volume De Natura Stirpium, which was published without illustrations, was intended partly as a gloss to the ancient writers.
His 1530 book Hippiatrika or Veterinariae medicinae, commissioned by Francis I, is a Latin collation of all that was written in Greek of Veterinary Medicine.
Charles Plumier, the noted Marseilles botanist named the genus Ruellia in his honour.
[3] Then in 1889, botanist C.B.Clarke published Ruelliopsis, a genus of flowering plants from South Africa belonging to the family Acanthaceae and whose name also honours Jean Ruel.