BOYER, Jean Baptiste, an eminent French physician, born at Marseilles in 1693. He devoted a long life to the special investigation and treatment of contagious epidemics with a courage and success which have rarely been surpassed. On the last appearance of the plague in western Europe in 1720, he was one of the physicians sent from Paris by the government to succour the inhabitants of his native city, then visited by this great calamity. The fearless zeal and ability which he displayed on that occasion, procured him a pension and the title of physician in ordinary to the king. Much of his subsequent life was spent in similar expeditions, devoted to philanthropy, wherever pestilential epidemics prevailed; and the value of the services of Boyer were fully acknowledged at Paris, Trèves, Beauvais, Montagne, Brest, and at several places in the Spanish peninsula.
He died in 1768. His writings are not numerous: the best known are his good Account of the Plague at Marseilles in 1720, and his Observations on the Epidemic that prevailed at Beauvais, published at Paris in 1750. (r. 8. 7.)