Antoine - Augustin Parmentier

Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737-1813), an Army pharmacist, single-handed promoted the introduction of the potato as a cultivar and food in France. His main activities were in agriculture, nutrition, and public health. He was responsible for the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign, pioneering the extraction of sugar from sugar beets, founding the first governmental school of bread making in France, and the study of methods and ways of preserving food, including heat sterilization and refrigeration. LifE ANd CAREER1-7 Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (Fig. 1), the second of the five children of Marie-Euphrosine Millon (1706-1776) and Jean-Baptiste-Augustin Parmentier (1710-1788), a modest draper, was born on 12 August 1737, in Montdidier, department of the Somme, Picardie. Two of his brothers died when he was 11 years old. Parmentier’s mother, who had been properly educated, took the responsibility of teaching her children, including giving them rudiments of Latin. The modest means of the family barred the children receiving an academic education and thus, when Antoine-Agustin was thirteen years old, having sufficient knowledge for entry into the pharmaceutical profession, found a position at the pharmacy of Frison at the Place de la Croix Bleue in Montdidier (now Place Parmentier), preparing medicines and chemicals. Paul-Felix Lendormy, a far away cousin, was the right-hand of the owner. Parmentier stayed with Frison five years and then, in 1755, at the age of eighteen, moved to Paris to work at the apothecary’s shop in Croix-des-Petits-Champs. He lodged in the home of Jean-Antoine Simonnet, a far relative of his, who in his youth had served as aide apothicaire at the Hôtel Royale des Invalides. The war that was to be known as the Seven Year War (1756-1763), involving all the mayor powers of Europe, was already looming in the horizon. Simonnet, recognizing the innate abilities of Parmentier and being aware of the insufficient number of pharmacy personnel in Jaime Wisniak. Department of Chemical Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel 84105. E-mail: [email protected] Fig. 1. Antoine-Agustin Parmentier (1737-1813). the French Army, recommended the young man to join the armed forces to further his career as a pharmacist. Admittance to the pertinent force required passing an examination, which Parmentier approved without diff iculty on the basis of the experience he had already accumulated. His examiner was the apothecary and RESEÑA Revista CENIC Ciencias Biológicas, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 141-148, mayo-agosto, 2010. 142 chemist Louis-Claude Cadet de Gassicourt (1731-1799); eventually Gassicourt and Parmentier would become very close friends and collaborators [Note 1]. Parmentier was twenty when he joined the army as apothicaire sous aide and remained a soldier until the end of his life. An important achievement of Parmentier during the war was stopping an epidemic of dysentery in one of the hospitals he was assigned to Pierre Bayen (1725-1798), the chief pharmacist of the French Army. Bayen favorably impressed by Parmentier’s courage and professional abilities, promoted him to pharmacist second class in 1758. In June 1760 Parmentier was promoted to pharmacist first class and Bayen was made pharmacien aide-major. During the Seven Year War Parmentier was wounded in action and captured by the Prussians several times. In the initial two weeks of his fifth term as prisoner of war, Parmentier’s daily ration were a few pieces of boiled potatoes, a food which the Germans used only for feeding pork. Eventually conditions improved and he became a prisoner of war with conditional liberty, authorized to work in a pharmacy in Frankfurt am Main, under the condition that he would not try to escape. It was here that he came across Johann Friedrich Meyer (1705-1765), a chemist-pharmacist who researched the chemistry of food and was substantial in advancing Parmentier’s education.5 The Seven Year War ended on February 10, 1763 by the Treaty of Paris and Parmentier, twenty-six years old, returned safely to Paris with a small sum in his pocket and an uncertain future. To support himself he worked in the apothecary shop of Bernard Lauron, a friend of Guillaume François Rouelle (1703-1770), at the rue des Petits-Champs, close to Simonnet, and in his free time attended lectures given by Abbot Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700-1770) on physics, Bernard de Jussieu (1699-1777) on botany, and Rouelle on chemistry. In October 1766 he competed successfully for the post of apothicaire gagnant-maîtrise at the Hôtel Royal des Invalides, with an annual salary of 300 livres plus free lodging, a certain amount of wood for heating and candles for lighting. Parmentier stayed six years at the Invalides, improving his knowledge and cultivating in the small his garden he had at his disposition, vegetables, which he believed were appropriate for human feeding. At the end of this period, he had been licensed as maître en pharmacie (1774) and was thinking about opening his own shop. In order to keep him at the hospital, Joseph Sahuguet d’Armazit, baron d’Espagnac (1713-1783), governor of the Hôtel des Invalides, negotiated the creation of the position of apothicaire-major, head of the pharmacy at Invalides. The pertinent royal decree was issued on July 18, 1772. Louis XIV (1638-1715), the Sun King, had founded the Hôtel des Invalides in 1671 to provide accommodation for disabled and impoverished war veterans. A royal decree, issued on March 7, 1676, assigned responsibility of the infirmaries permanently to the Compagnie des Filles de la Charité (Daughters of Charity, founded in 1633 by Vincent de Paul), known as the Grey Sisters on account of their habit. A staff of attendants and servants was appointed to the service of the Hôtel. It included a governor, appointed for life by the king, medical personnel (a physician, a surgeon, and a pharmacist), management, bakery, and police. One very important privilege was that the guards were wounded soldiers; no armed troops might even enter it. At the time of Parmentier, the hospital housed about three thousand veterans, served by some five hundred employees. According to the royal contract, the Sisters were wholly responsible for the infirmaries of the hospital and the treatment of the sick soldiers; for the preparation of medicines, drugs, syrups, and sweets, and if they were not familiar or did not how to prepare a particular unguent, they could order it made by the apothecary or the surgeon.8 The Gray Sisters, who had the absolute management of the hospital, strongly opposed Parmentier’s appointment, refused his entrance to the laboratories, and complained to everyone including the bishop and Princess Adélaïde de France, their protector. In 1774 the Council of State ruled in favor of the Sisters and the abolition of Parmentier’s position. This opposition led the King, on December 31, 1774, to revoke Parmentier’s appointment. Louis XVI compensated Parmentier with an appointment of pensionnaire du roi, with an annual pension of 1 200 livres and the right to lodge for life in the hospital [Note 2]. This Solomonic decision of the King probably led to the most important contribution of Parmentier to the nutritional habits of the French as well as the establishment of potato as a successful new crop in France. Free of all obligations and having at his disposal all his time, he was now able to use his small garden to pursue his interest on growing plants having nutritional value.3,8 On his return from Germany Parmentier was influenced by the repeated years of famine and imposed on himself a humanitarian mission. In his own words: “Mes recherches n’ont eu d’autre but que les progrès de l’art et le bien général...La nourriture du people est ma sollicitude, mon voeu, c’est d’en améliorer la qualité et d’en diminuer le prix...J’ai écrit pour être utile à tous” (My research has no other goal but the progress of the art and general good. The feeding of the people is my concern and my wish is to improve the quality and reduce the price [of bread]”.2,5 His work led him eventually to consider the potato for this purpose, a vegetable that was despised in France where it was occasionally fed to cattle, but eaten widely in other European countries. It is generally agreed that Parmentier single-handedly popularized the use of the potato in France against very strong opposition and prejudice. Today, any French dish with Parmentier’s name attached to it, for example, potage Parmentier (potato soup), indicates that the main ingredient is potatoes.2 In 1779, he was appointed censeur royal (royal censor), for examining and approving all the books that appeared on the subjects of pharmacy and chemistry. He was also charged with traveling around France inNote 1. Gassicourt spent several years with the military, reorganizing the pharmaceutical services of the French armies stationed in Germany in 1761. He his considered the first to have synthesized organometallic compounds. Note 2. In 1792 the National Assembly removed the benefit of free lodgment from all the personnel of the hospital but against this decision, the Conseil de Santé ordered that it be maintained for “le philantrope Parmentier”. Revista CENIC Ciencias Biológicas, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 141-148, mayo-agosto, 2010. 143 vestigating the reasons for the poor quality of bread. His inquiries demonstrated that the poor quality was due not only to faulty procedures used in its manufacture, but also to the inappropriate methods employed in milling wheat. During his tour of France Parmentier visited his hometown, Montdidier, where he was received as an illustrious son. The authorities took advantage of his visit to ask his help for ways of fighting a plague that was ravaging their wheat crop, the “black disease” (carie du froment, or blé noir). Parmentier collected the black seeds, made a series of chemical tests to determine the nature of the pest, and recommended washing the seeds with limewater as a preservative against the plague. He reported his results in a memoir read to the Société Royale de Médecine.9 One important outcome of his long service as pharmacist of the army was his Codex, pharmacopée française10,11 published by order of the government commission composed of professors of the faculty of medicine and the School of Pharmacy in Paris (1837), with the support of the Conseil Général d’Administration des Hospices Civils de Paris et de Secours à Domicile.2 This Code is a true handbook of the pharmaceutical sciences, devoted to the teaching of the many aspects of the discipline. It is also a critical study of the official and magisterial preparations of its time, as well as of the experience accumulated by the author. The first chapter (Materia Medica) describes the drugs belonging to the vegetable kingdom (245 in total, 100 of them indigenous), the animal kingdom (19 substances), and mineral (36 products), and about 70 synthetic chemicals. The second chapter (Official Medicaments), containing 21 sections, refers to the official medicines, and the third chapter (Prescriptions) describes the preparation of magisterial drugs. There are also chapters about the care of medicines and the management of hospital problems such as air healthiness, disinfection of wards, etc. Parmentier promoted the improved cultivation of maize and chestnuts12,13(Parmentier,1780, 1812b), and tried to reform the methods of baking (Parmentier, 1778).14 During the Revolution he took care of the preparation of salted provisions15 and manufactured a sea biscuit.16 He recommended the conservation of the meats by the cold, and also worked on the improvement of the technique of food preserves by boiling, discovered by Nicolas Appert (1749-1841), in 1810. Parmentier did extensive research about wine and the different products from the vineyard, such as raisins. He promptly realized the importance of the latter, as an alternative source of sugar, which was coming into France in large quantities as part of the tribute paid by the colonies. He proclaimed the excellence of raisin syrup, having a larger sweetening power than the solid material and promoted its large-scale production in France. The continental blockade of France, which had resulted among other things, in an exorbitant increase in the price of sugar, led Parmentier, between 1808 and 1813, to work extensively on the manufacture of syrups and preserves based on raisins to replace cane sugar, and to pioneer the extraction of sugar from beets.17-21 Parmentier also conducted investigations in a wide range of other subjects, for example, preservation of grain and flour,22 improvements in milling,23 milk,24-26 chocolate,27 and preservation of vinegar, wine, and meat.28-31 He contributed articles to the twelve-volume Cours Complet d’Agriculture, edited by Abbe François Rozier (1734-1793) in 1781;32 he participated in the writing of the twenty-four-volume Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris, 1803-1804); and published his book Economie Rurale et Domestique, of which only six volumes of the projected eight appeared before his death.33 The Académie Royale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux, aware of the need of interesting farmers in the cultivation of corn, proposed in 1784 a prize on the subject, which was awarded to Parmentier’s contribution Le Maïs ou Blé de Turquie Apprécié sous tous ses Rapports.13 Parmentier also contributed to many aspects of public health, among them, he was responsible for the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign (under Napoleon starting in 1805, when he was InspectorGeneral of the Health Service). He postulated that lack of vaccination, practiced only by the rich, was discriminatory against the poor; he demanded the opening of public centers for free vaccination and the publication of a short and simple document to explain the poor the advantages of the treatment.34 He studied quality of water from the Seine,35,36 with Nicolas Deyeux (1745 -1837) he carried on chemical studies of pathological changes in the blood,37,38 with Louis Guillaume Laborie (?-1800) and Antoine Cadet de Vaux (1743-1828) on sanitation of cesspools,39 and with them and Hecquet on exhumations.40 The work with Hecquet and Cadet de Vaux was somewhat unusual. In 1452 the Church of Saint-Eloy, sometime the only parish of Dunkerque, was authorized to bury parishioners inside its building. Inhumations were a good income source to the church but with time they became a health danger to the parishioners. The humidity and saltiness of the ground generated germs and obnoxious odors that carried the risk of epidemics. The need to improve the building led a judge in 1777 to authorize the exhumation and transfer of as many bodies as possible to an outside cemetery. The responsibility of this operation was assigned to Hecquet, Chirurgien-Mayor of the Royal hospitals, with the assistance of Parmentier and Cadet de Vaux. The report they issued recommended that in order to avoid the workers becoming ill they to had to carry a bottle with vinegar and, from time to time, rub their hands and faces with the liquid, and to add, from time to time, potassium nitrate and aromatic substances to braziers with burning coals. Some of exhumed bodies were found to be dry and in a mummified state while others were putrefied. Mummification was assumed to be due to the constitution of the bodies and to the persons having been heavy drinkers (!). Several bodies showed all the signs that the person had been alive at the time of burial, but due to lethargy, assumed to be dead. The exhumation technique developed by Hecquet, Cadet, and Parmentier would be used afterwards (1786) be used to transfer the mass grave in the Cimetière des Innocents. Parmentier, who never married, passed away on December 17, 1813, at the age of 76, victim of a lung infection. He was interred at Père Lachaise cemetery (division 39, place 56) in Paris. The monument that houses his grave was built with the contribution of the military pharmacists. It is made of stone shaped as a parallelogram (Fig. 2). One of the faces represents a plough located between a wheat bundle and a corn stem; another shows a distillation retort and a basket full of potatoes intertwined with a vine stock, to show his many contributions to humanity. On one side of the tomb it is the written: Revista CENIC Ciencias Biológicas, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 141-148, mayo-agosto, 2010. 144 In his testament Parmentier left 600 francs to the Société de Pharmacie to establish a fund for an annual prize on a question to be decided by the Société. The first subject selected for the 1815 prize was to determine the existence or non existence in vegetables of a substance named generically extractif, which was different from the immediate materials known then.