John Ordronaux (August 3, 1830 – January 20, 1908) was an American Civil War army surgeon, a professor of medical jurisprudence, a pioneering mental health commissioner and a generous patron of university endowments.

[1] Between 1859 and 1901 Ordronaux published at least fifteen books and articles about subjects as diverse as heroes of the American Revolution of 1776, military medicine, medical jurisprudence, mental health, United States constitutional law and historical treatises.

To supply them with the requisite amount of information, the accompanying popular manual has therefore been prepared.In 1863 he wrote a historical treatise in French (with Reinaud) on the commercial and political relations between the Roman Empire and the countries of Oriental Asia.

[14][15] He also translated into English verse the medieval Latin text of Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, the medical encyclopedia of the Scuola Medica Salernitana.

[16] Ordronaux developed an interest in mental health and between 1872 and 1882 he was a member of the New York State Commission in Lunacy writing two books on the subject.

[17][18] The second of these books mentions the opening of a ground breaking mental hospital and in his preface to the book he says, The recent establishment of a department of Lunacy supervision by the State of New York, has turned public attention to it as a source for consultation, in the application of our Statute and Common Law to the legal relations of the insane......Insanity is a subject which touches our civil rights at so many different points, that it may be said to have a place in every problem involving human responsibility.

To collect and embody in one treatise the principles of law by which courts govern their adjudications in questions of mental incapacity, and to expound through commentaries both the philosophy of these decisions and the rules of procedure under which they are rendered, is the object aimed at in this manual of Lunacy practice.

[21] By 1882 his forward thinking and outspokenness had made him some enemies and in 1882 his salary of $4000 as Commissioner in Lunacy was temporarily opposed in debate in the finance committee of the New York State Senate.

Its object is to expound those administrative powers which, in our dual form of representative government, are sovereign within their several spheres of action.....A written Constitution is a political grammar to whose rules administrative laws must conform, in order to give them judicial validity.....The government of forty four independent States, dwelling in harmonious relations under a supervisory Federal sovereignty, would seem, therefore, to justify the treatment of Legislation as a department of jurisprudence meriting more textual consideration than it has yet received.....the present treatise has been prepared to meet the wants of those who, desiring to practise or interpret the canons of representative government in the United States, may seek to master the secrets of its architecture through a study of the labors of its founders, and to trace its genesis and development to a providential origin in the Spartan Commonwealths of our colonial period.In 1898 Ordronaux wrote a biography of a Leonice Sampson Moulton,[25] a presumed relative of his foster father, possibly his foster mother.

As Miss Sampson, she was sent on a secret mission to the US embassy in Buenos Aires to enquire into the sovereignty dispute between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands.

[26] Reading like a tribute to his own life's work he says, A strange feeling possesses me as I rise to address you......I am here to perform, with much surprise to myself, the same duty which devolved upon me, on a similar occasion, thirty six years ago.......I stand in the presence of two distinct periods with all their differing and startling results.

Our country has added nine states to the framework of our Federal Union, and buttressed its Constitution with armor plated Amendments whose necessity had never been contemplated.

Our very name, the United States, has changed its former significance and been adjudicated by our highest Appellate Tribunal to be no longer a plural substantive, but a noun in the singular number describing a nation of political equals, and not a league or partnership of States.Ordronaux died of "apoplexy" at his home, Glen Head, in Roslyn, New York on January 20, 1908.