Pierre, a very celebrated French physician, born at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Poitou, in 1748. After taking his doctor's degree at Paris, he bent his thoughts on reforming physic, by restoring the precepts of Hippocrates and Galen, and exploring the maxims of the Arabians; for which purpose he publicly explained Galen's works, instead of those of Avicenna, Rhases, and Mesvè. He afterwards resolved to travel, to acquire a knowledge of plants; and going to Portugal, he practised physic in the city of Evora. His new method of bleeding in pleuritis, on the side where the pleurisy was situated, occasioned a memorable controversy among the Portuguese physicians, and was brought before the university of Salamanca, which at last gave judgment, that the opinion maintained by Brissot was the pure doctrine of Galen. The partisans of Denis, his opponent, appealed in 1529 to the emperor, to prevent the practice, as being fraught with dangerous consequences; but in consequence of the death of the eldest son of Charles III., duke of Savoy, from a pleurisy at this very time, after having been bled on the opposite side, the prosecution dropped. Brissot died at Lisbon in 1522. He wrote an apology for his practice, which was published at Paris, in 8vo, in 1525, by his friend Antonio Luccas. Renatus Moreau printed a new edition at Paris in 1622, and annexed to it a treatise entitled De Sanguiinis Missione in Pleuritide, together with a life of Brissot.

Brisson de Warville, Jean Pierre, the chief of the Brissonite or pure republican party in France during the early stages of the revolution of 1789, was born at Chartres, Jan. 14, 1754. His father, who was a pastry-cook, gave his son a liberal education, and Brissot assumed an author when he had scarcely left college. The boldness of his writings against the inequality of ranks excited the displeasure of the government, and subjected him to a prosecution and imprisonment in the Bastile.

On regaining his liberty he visited England, and endeavoured, though unsuccessfully, to maintain himself in London by his literary talents. He then returned to France; and having again rendered himself obnoxious to the government by an attack on the administration of the Archbishop of Sens, he escaped a second imprisonment by a journey to Holland. In the beginning of 1788 he repaired to America; but on the approach of the revolution he returned to Paris. He commenced his revolutionary career in 1789, by the publication of some pamphlets, and particularly of a journal entitled Le Patriote François. He belonged to the Représentation des Communes, which was formed in the capital a short time previous to the memorable 14th of July. On the storming of the Bastile, the keys were deposited with him. He was elected president of the Jacobin Club; and, in consequence of his zeal and activity in the revolutionary cause, he was appointed president of the Comité des Recherches, which served as the model of all those similar committees which were afterwards successively formed. On the flight of the royal family in 1791, Brissot, in concert with the Chevalier de Laclos, drew up the famous petition of the Champ de Mars. At this period the republican faction began to assume a consistent form, and to utter their sentiments with freedom and boldness. Brissot, who had been one of its first and most zealous apostles, was returned to the National Assembly, in spite of the opposition of the court, to which he had become extremely formidable; and from this time he displayed an implacable enmity to the king. The Assembly attributing to him talents which he does not appear to have possessed, appointed him a member of the diplomatic committee, of which he became the habitual organ; and in this capacity he was the constant advocate of the most violent public measures, and never ceased to demand a declaration of war against all the powers of Europe. In order to attain this object, he denounced all the ministers whose dispositions were favourable to peace, but particularly the foreign minister M. Delessart; and at length succeeded in obtaining a decree of accusation against him. His place was supplied by Dumouriez, under whose administration war was declared against the Emperor of Germany, on the 20th of April 1792. From this period, however, the political influence of Brissot began to decline. Robespierre, with whom he had previously been intimately connected, now declared himself his enemy, denounced him at the Jacobin Club as a traitor and an enemy of the people, and thenceforth persecuted him with unrelenting rancour. Alarmed at the storm which was gathering around him, Brissot, in concert with the other leaders of his party, attempted to effect a reconciliation with the constitutional royalists; but this attempt having proved abortive, he reverted to his former line of conduct, and continued to denounce to popular vengeance all those whom he knew to be attached to the king. As the organ of the diplomatic committee, he obtained the declaration of war against England and Holland, on the 1st of February 1793. The Montagnard party had now acquired a complete ascendency, and the destruction of the Girondists was determined on. Brissot, among the rest, was proscribed, after the revolution of the 31st of May. He was arrested at Moulins while attempting to make his escape into Switzerland, and after a mock trial, was beheaded at Paris on the 31st of October 1793.