Antoine Poissonnier-Desperrières

Born in the early 1720s and active through the later 18th century, Antoine Poissonnier-Desperrières was a French doctor best known for writing about the health of seafarers. Bibliographic records link him to Traité des maladies des gens de mer (first published in 1767, with a revised edition in 1780), a substantial study of the diseases affecting sailors.

Modern scholarship remembers him especially for his ideas about scurvy and diet. He argued that the salted provisions commonly used aboard ships contributed to illness, and he promoted a more vegetable-based regimen for sailors as a way to improve health on long voyages.

Some later catalog and bookseller descriptions also associate him with royal medical service and with oversight of naval and colonial hospitals, but those details are not consistently documented in the sources I could confirm. What is clear is that his writing became part of a larger 18th-century debate about naval hygiene, food, and the practical challenge of keeping crews alive at sea.