Jean François Anne Julien de Durand de Nougarède de Monestrol (12 October 1804 – 11 September 1868) was a French orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy. He was a colleague of François Perrussel, and in 1854 he met Paul Ferdinand Gachet, homeopath to Vincent Van Gogh.
Julien de Monestrol was a member of the Société Hahnemannienne of Paris. Other leading French homeopaths who were also members of this classical homeopathic society included Antoine Henri Petroz, Léon Simon, and Simon Félix Camille Crosério.
Julien de Monestrol later became actively involved in the Refuge Sainte-Anne for abandoned girls. This refuge and the lives of the “madeleines” inspired the writer and supporter of homeopathy, Alexandre Dumas, to write his booklet Les Madeleines Repenties.
Julien de Durand de Nougarède de Monestrol was born in Saint-Nazaire, Loire-Atlantique, on 12 October 1804. His parents were from the minor French nobility; his father was Roger Honoré de Durand de Nougarède de Monestrol (1771 – 1855), whose maternal grandparents were Pierre, Marquis d’Hautpoul, and Marie France de Bernon, Dame de Seyres; his mother was Jeanne-Marie Destrem (1783 – 1859), whose father, Hugues Destrem (1754 – 1804), was a notable Toulouse cloth merchant, a French revolutionary, and a member of the Council of Five Hundred during the period of the Directoire. In 1801, Hugues Destrem was exiled to Guyana for opposing Napoleon’s coup of 18th Brumaire.
De Monestrol authored several books in French on homeopathy. In 1855, he issued his book on the treatment of Gout by the use of homeopathy, although it appears that he had previously published it in London as early as 1849. That year the British Journal of Homeopathy gave an unfavourable review of his book, describing it as being written in “a mixed dialect of Gallo-Franco-Anglo-Saxon.”
The reviewer also revealed that at the time De Monestrol was residing in England, at 11 Pembroke Place, Liverpool, at the time a centre for homeopathy in Britain.
[original “necrologie” of de Monestrol, by Perrussel > https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5712865p/f12]
“Dr. Durand de Monestrol, Baron de Nogarède, Marquis d’Esquille (title he gave to his brother), was born around 1804, at the castle of Montréjaud, near Toulouse, of a family sacrificed by the revolution of 93.
He had studied law and even in medicine with successes that made him hope for a distinguished magistrate or practitioner, when an attack of his disease (complicated heart hypertrophy of a vomic with asthma) forced him to suspend his studies, and to enter, once handed over, into a large administration that La Rochejaquelein founded in Brittany.
We were then in the midst of homeopathic spread to Nantes, where Hahnemann had sent us, whom we had just seen and left (1837-1839).
It was in this city and at the time of our most active apostolate that this friend, still very ill, was addressed to us and recommended by an intimate friend of La Rochejaquelein, the Count of Aubépin, already our client (1843), the year of the death of Hahnemann.
We were asked to bring by our very criticized, so heavily criticized, some relief to the unheard-of suffering that was already paralysing all the activity and means of the poor patient. Examination of its evil in its complications, amacon and arsenic atoms were the first valuable agents which began the series of improvements which we had the happiness of bringing to it, and which allowed the use of bleaching and emetics, which, by deceptive relief, undermined this existence by rapidly leading it to an already announced end.
Such a quick success could not fail to strike such intelligence and to make it favourable to the study of the new medicine that had just been carried out so fortunately. It was, in fact, what happened. For more than three years, the Baron of Monestrol studied the works of Hahnemann and his early disciples. Once his title was obtained, the Baron actively entered into medical practice and devoted himself to body and soul, with the greatest recognition, to relieve on any occasion the sick of any class who applied for his ministry. …
As a writer, the Baron de Monestrol has been known over several important publications that have rendered very great service to the spread of our ideas. He had begun by collaborating in our work in our book The Truth in Medicine and our journal L’Observateur Homoeopathe de la Loire-Inférieure (1846-47).
In 1848, after a journey of exploration, with unheard-of courage, to England, to study the possibility of an installation, he published in English and then in French a good monograph of the Goute treated by homeopathy. But the most important work he produced, and which gives the true stamp of his talent as a thinker, a doctor and a writer, is his Treatise on Hygiene, which has been exhausted for a few years, and of which we had to insert one of the best chapters in our Guide du Médecin (1861).
Returning to Paris with us in 1852-1853, after our installation, homeopathy in Lille, so well continued by our Honourable colleague Dr. Malapert, the Baron de Monestrol, thanks to high relations and S. Exe. the Duke of Bassano, the first chamberlain of the Emperor and president of this work, was called to be the secretary of the administration of the Refuge Sainte-Anne, an institution which was born at the time (1855), and intended to extract from the debauchery of abandoned young girls, to make them honest workers and mothers of families.
Soon it took a doctor for the sick every day, and as the administration could not make the cost, nor the pharmacy, we already guess what was supposed to happen. Indeed, the secretary assigned himself a new function as free as the first, despite the car costs occasioned by long races, and for more than twelve years devoted himself to the relief of these interesting young girls, whose founding Mother, Miss Chupin, was a poor worker almost destitute.
How many times we have accompanied him and even replaced him, during his great crises, in this stay which has become almost, thanks to charity, a vast establishment – and that miracles have not we seen him operate with his vast medical experience, and even with the scarce resources of his pilgrim’s bursa.
It was therefore possible to observe his convoy, which was to be and was, according to his orders, that of the poor, this long line, over two ranks, of these young girls, who no longer only mourned the doctor and friend, but the true superior and benefactor of their community. Who will replace him now… ?
The Baron de Monestrol does not leave any sons who can continue such a noble task and carried out. ”
Dr. Jean François Anne Julien de Durand de Nougarède de Monestrol died on 11 September, 1868 at his home, 19, Rue de Lille, Paris, aged 63 years old.
According to historian Jason Szabo, who cited a medical eulogy written for de Monestrol in Incurable and Intolerable: Chronic Disease and Slow Death in Nineteenth-Century France:
Baron de Monestrol, for example, was praised for the fact that “until his final moments, this fine man saw to our charitable organization. . . . His patience and resignation were unrivalled despite horrible inner and outward suffering, for his body was one large open sore.” [Alexis Lefebvre, La science de bien mourir, 2e partie, 3: 263].
Select Publications:
Conservation de la Santé. Manuel d’hygiène à l’usage de tous, mais principalement des personnes qui ont adopté la doctrine de Hahnemann. (1851)
De l’Homoeopathie, de sa doctrine, de ses prescriptions et du régime à suivre pendant le traitement des maladies aiguës et chroniques, with François Perrussel. (1853)
Du choléra, de l’action de l’agent cholérique; de l’hygiène en temps des premiers secours à donner aux malades en l’absence
d’épidémie du médecin, de l’emploi de médicaments préventifs camphre et des bains chauds comme curatifs. (1853)
A Sketch on Gout, the Nature of that Disease, its Causes, its Treatment and Cure by the Homeopathic Method (1849/1855)
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