Jean-François Dugniolle (9 August 1808 – 16 June 1892) was a Belgian orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy to become one of the founders of the Belgian Homeopathic Society, in 1837.
In October 1843, Dugniolle was admitted as a member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine. He was unanimously elected a foreign corresponding member of the Société Hahnemannienne de Paris in 1849 and, in 1860, became a member of the Société Médicale Homoeopathique de France.
Dugniolle was a colleague of Pierre Joseph De Moor, Louis Malaise, Charles-Louis de Meester, Louis Joseph Varlez and many others.
Jean-François Dugniolle was born in Leuze-en-Hainaut, Belgium on 9 August 1808, the son of Jean François Hubert Dugnolle (b. 1772) and Florentine Clémentine Fontaine (1784 – 1856).
In 1835, Gottlieb Heinrich Georg Jahr founded the Belgian Homeopathic Society, with ten homeopaths representing seven cities. Dugniolle was an original member.
This group was later joined by:
Loosvelt of Tielt, Bogaerts of Thielrode, De Cooman of Oosterzele, Elewaut of Haasdonck, Van den Stappele of Thermonde, Soenens and Victor Wullaert of Courtrai, Amand of Gavere, Dobbelaere of Bruges, Martiny, Gaillaird, Jules Gaudy, Baron Louis Joseph G Seutin, Huyvenaer, De Mulder, Chevalier, Fauconnier, Haemelrath, Edmond Mersch and Nyssens of Brussels, Leonard Lambreght, Boniface Schmitz and Van den Heuvel of Antwerp, Bernard and Criquelion of Mons, Samuel Van den Berghe of Ghent; the veterinary physicians Mans of Brussels, pharmacists Emile Seutin and Van Berkekaere of Brussels and Dwelshauvers of Ghent.
During a major cholera outbreak in 1848, Dugniolle’s colleague Louis-Joseph Varlez was offered a position in an orthodox hospital in Brussels. Among the conditions Varlez set when agreeing to the offer was to request that in the event of his own forced absence, illness, or incapacity, he must be temporarily replaced by either of his homeopathic colleagues, Dr.’s Carlier or Dugniolle.
At the Gallican homeopathic congress, the first international gathering of homeopaths, held in Brussels on 24 September 1856, Dugniolle was elected archivist and treasurer. Forty homeopaths from France, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Germany and Algeria, attended this meeting. This congress was also noteworthy due to the intervention of French homeopaths, led by Léon Simon and Antoine Petroz, to prevent Mélanie Hahnemann from attending.
Little is known about Dugniolle’s medical career after this point, although in 1871, he was still listed in The Homoeopathic Medical Directory of Great Britain and Ireland as a practicing homeopath in Brussels, along with Dr.’s Carlier, Dilienbourg, Herman, Hannon, Jorez, A. Lelong, Molinari, Mouremans, Ragmey, St. Molin, Van Vrekom, and Varlez.
In addition to his medical work, Dugniolle took a keen interest in numismatics and, in 1876, published a four-volume history of the jetons (calculation tokens used by merchants during the early modern period) used in the 17 provinces of The Netherlands. His work remains the primary reference for Dutch and Belgian tokens:
Dugniolle was a vice-president and active member of the Royal Society of Numismatics since July 5, 1857 and had resigned in 1889, after selling his collections, in Ghent and Brussels in 1885.
His old age no longer allowed him to seriously deal with numismatics; he therefore lived in retirement and only had his many properties administred.
In 1868, when he was Vice-President of the Society, Dugniolle offered a gold medal of two hundred francs to the author of the best handwritten and unpublished work on coins, or on medals and tokens belonging to the nine Belgian provinces. This prize was never awarded, no work having been presented.
Dugniolle wrote little in our Review; he published a few lines on a medal from Boendael (Ixelles), on a discovery of coins from the 11th and 12th centuries, on some coins from Liège and, finally, on the Bear-type tokens that he attributed to Bruges and its territory.
His main work, published outside our Review, is entitled: the historical token of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands (Brussels, Fr. Gobbaerts, imp., 1876, 1877 and 1880, 4 volumes in-8°).
These volumes were not received with great favour: most of the plates were mediocre or bad, the descriptions were neglected and the omissions numerous.
Our learned colleague Mr. J. Rouyer, an authority on tokens, appreciated this work in the following terms: “It is less a study than a catalogue. The author could have made his collection more complete than he did, for the times before the establishment of the Dukes of Burgundy in the Low Countries.” This lack of success certainly contributed to distancing Dugniolle from numismatics and, from 1880, the date of the appearance of volume IV of this work, he kept silent and showed himself less and less at our meetings
Dugniolle married three times. He first married Barbe Elise Delonge. They had two sons, Guillaume François Marie Dugniolle (ca. 1841 – 1859) and Léon Constant François Dugniolle (b. 1843). In July 1856, he married Célinie Désirée Josephine Charlotte Dépinoy (1814 – 1866), with whom he had a son, Alexandre Florent François Dugniolle (1853 – 1924). In May 1867, he married for a third time, Clothilde Joséphine Fontaine.
Jean-François Dugniolle died in Brussels on 16 June 1892. His obituary was in volume 48 of the Revue Belge de Numismatique.
Select Publications:
Leave A Comment