Jean-Baptiste Bertrand (physician)

Jean-Baptiste Bertrand comes from a commercial family in Martigues. He studied at the Jesuit college in Marseille. His father intended him for the ecclesiastical state, but having made the acquaintance of a renowned doctor in Avignon, he turned to medicine and studied in Avignon and Montpellier. He moved to Marseille around 1707 and acquired a good reputation. During the plague of Marseilles which occurred in 1720 he devoted himself without counting towards the plague-stricken and wrote a book Relation historique de la plague  ; in this work, he shows himself to be a true precursor of microbial ideas: "The difference between our domestic insects and those of the plague is that the latter are invisible and so small that.^[2] Bertrand belonged to what has been called the contagionist school, while his adversaries asserted that the disease which decimated Marseille was in no way epidemic.^[3]

He was one of the founding members of the Académie de Marseille and became one of its most regular members at meetings.^[4]

• Baptiste Bertrand, Cologne, Pierre Marteau,1721^[5]
• Baptiste Bertrand, Amsterdam and Marseilles, Jean Mossy,1779^[6]