Alexandre Jacques François Brière de Boismont

Who was Alexandre Jacques François Brière de Boismont?

Alexandre Jacques François Brière de Boismont was a French physician and psychiatrist born in Rouen.

In 1825 he received his medical doctorate in Paris, afterwards working as a physician at a nursing home in Sainte-Colombe. In 1831 he performed important studies of a cholera epidemic in Poland, and in 1838 was appointed director of a private nursing home on Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, located near the Panthéon de Paris. Beginning in 1859, he practiced medicine in Saint-Mande.

Brière de Boismont was the author of numerous publications in several medical fields, that included hygiene, forensic medicine and anatomy, but is best known for his work in psychiatry. In 1845 he published Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire raisonnée des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de l'extase, du magnétisme et du somnambulisme, a landmark study of hallucinations, of which he considered were a significant part of mankind's psychological history. This book was later translated into English as "On Hallucinations: Or, the Rational History of Apparitions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism".

In 1856 he published a comprehensive study on suicide, titled Du suicide et de la folie suicide.