or **BARTHÈS**, Paul Joseph, one of the most celebrated physicians of the university of Montpellier, equally remarkable for the variety and extent of his erudition, and for the vigour of mind displayed in his abstruse speculations. He was born on the 11th of December 1734, at Montpellier, and received his early education at Narbonne, where his family resided, and afterwards at Toulouse. He soon gave decisive indications of those talents with which nature had endowed him, and which destined him to occupy a distinguished station among the learned men of the age. He commenced the study of medicine, at Montpellier in 1750, and in 1753, when he had only attained his nineteenth year, he received his doctor's degree. He afterwards occasionally visited Paris, where he attracted the notice, and acquired the friendship, of the most distinguished literati of that period. In 1756 he obtained the appointment of physician to the military hospital in Normandy, attached to the army of observation commanded by Marshal d'Estrées. The zeal and assiduity with which he discharged the duties of his new office were most exemplary. He spent his whole time at the hospital, and often passed the night at the bedside of his patients. Though naturally of a good constitution, his strength was not commensurate with the ardour of his mind. His health suffered much from the intensity of his application, and he was often very near falling a sacrifice to fevers and other disorders which he caught from the patients in the hospital; and he thence became liable ever after to attacks of dysentery and bilious fever.

Many of the observations and inquiries which he made during this period were published in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences; and two of his first productions were crowned by the Academy of Inscriptions. In 1757 his services were required in the medical staff of the army of Westphalia, where he had the rank of consulting physician. On his return to Paris he contributed several articles to the Journal des Savans and to the Encyclopédie; and was, indeed, for a time considered one of the editors of the former of those works. In 1761 he obtained a medical professorship at Montpellier, in which his abilities as a teacher soon shone forth with unrivalled lustre. His success was the more honourable inasmuch as his colleagues, Lamure, Leroy, and Vénel, were men of distinguished reputation, and had raised the school to a high pitch of celebrity.

In 1774 he was created joint chancellor of the university, with the certainty of succeeding singly to the office on the death of his colleague, which happened in 1786. He afterwards took the degree of doctor in civil law, and was appointed counsellor to the supreme court of Aids at Montpellier. In 1780, he was induced to fix his residence in Paris, having been nominated consulting physician to the king, with a brevet of counsellor of state, and a pension of a hundred louis. Honours now crowded upon him; he was admitted free associate to the Academies of Sciences and of Inscriptions, and appointed first physician to the Duke of Orleans, in the room of Tronchin. His reputation increased in proportion as his merits were displayed on a wider theatre. He practised as a physician at Paris for nearly ten years, and received the most flattering testimonials of public approbation.

This brilliant career was suddenly interrupted by the great political revolution which broke out at this period, and by which the interests of every individual in France, however tranquil his pursuits or obscure his station, were more or less immediately affected.

Barthez was now obliged to quit Paris, and seek in his native province that tranquillity and repose which the stormy aspect of the times forbade him to hope for in a more conspicuous station, holding, as he did, opinions so much at variance with the new order of things. Though he had lost the greater part of his fortune, acquired by so much labour, and was deprived of the honours to which he possessed so just a claim, he determined, upon his retiring to Carcassonne, to practise his profession gratuitously, and devote all his leisure hours to the speculative studies connected with it, which had been the ruling passion of his life. It was in this retreat that he gave to the world his Nouvelle Mécanique des Mouvements de l'Homme et des Animaux, which appeared in 1798.

On the re-establishment of the College of Medicine at Montpellier, Barthez was naturally looked up to as the person best calculated to revive its former fame. But age and infirmity operated to dissuade him from resuming the laborious office of teacher; and he was accordingly nominated honorary professor. In 1802 he received several marks of favour from the new government under Buonaparte; he was nominated titular physician to the government, and afterwards consulting physician to the emperor, and member of the Legion of Honour.

His Traité des Maladies Goutteuses, in two volumes octavo, appeared in 1802; and he afterwards occupied himself in preparing for the press a new edition of his Éléments de la Science de l'Homme, of which he just lived to see the publication. His health had been declining for some years before his death, which took place soon after his removal to Paris, on the 15th of October 1806, in the seventy-second year of his age. He bequeathed his books and manuscripts to M. Lordat, who, in consequence, published two volumes of Consultations de Médecine, Paris, 1810, 8vo, to which he prefixed a preface of his own. Another posthumous work of Barthez, the Traité du Beau, preceded by some account of his life, was edited in 1807 by his brother, M. Barthez de Marmorières, who is known as the author of agricultural essays, and projects for improving the maritime coast of Languedoc, together with some translations from the oriental languages; and who has sometimes been mistaken for the subject of the present article.

Barthez has enjoyed a much higher reputation on the Continent than in this country, where, indeed, his writings are comparatively little known. The work which has chiefly contributed to establish his fame, and which contains the development of his peculiar opinions on physiology, is the Nouveaux Éléments de la Science de l'Homme. It is not written, however, with the simplicity and clearness which might have been expected from one who had been in the constant habit of instructing others, and whose lectures were generally admired as possessing those qualities in an eminent degree.

Amidst many vague and unprofitable speculations, his work contains a great store of facts, which are often instructive, though sometimes they expose the credulity of the author.

In the preface to his Nova Doctrina de Functionibus Naturae Humanae, he has given an excellent arrangement of the general principles of the objects to be kept in view in the medical treatment of diseases. He treats of this subject more at large in his treatise De Methodo Medendi, published at Montpellier in 1777, and also in the preface to his Traité des Maladies Goutteuses.

The writings of Barthez appear to have had considerable influence in overthrowing many of the crude and pretentious theories which had prevailed in the schools of medicine; and, however, he may have been seduced from the path of genuine philosophy by an excessive disposition to generalize, and an overweening fondness for abstruse speculation, he still deserves the praise of being an original thinker, and of standing pre-eminent among his contemporaries for the courage with which he shook off the trammels of authority, in a university where it had ruled with despotic sway, and where the dogmas of antiquity were held in peculiar reverence.