author

Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz

1731–1807

A busy 18th-century French naturalist, physician, and publisher, he turned a wide curiosity about plants, minerals, animals, and medicine into a long stream of books. His work is especially remembered for botanical and natural history publications that mixed scholarship, compilation, and striking illustration.

1 Audiobook

The Toilet of Flora or, A collection of the most simple and approved methods of preparing baths, essences, pomatums, powders, perfumes, and sweet-scented waters. With receipts for cosmetics of every kind, that can smooth and brighten the skin, give force to beauty, and take off the appearance of old age and decay

The Toilet of Flora or, A collection of the most simple and approved methods of preparing baths, essences, pomatums, powders, perfumes, and sweet-scented waters. With receipts for cosmetics of every kind, that can smooth and brighten the skin, give force to beauty, and take off the appearance of old age and decay

by Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz

About the author

Born in Metz in 1731 and later active in Nancy and Paris, Pierre-Joseph Buc'hoz trained first in law and then earned a medical degree in 1763. He worked as a physician, taught botany, and wrote across an unusually wide range of subjects, including natural history, mineralogy, and medical ideas.

He is best known as a prolific author and compiler. Sources consistently describe him as deeply engaged with botany, while also noting his broader interests in animals, minerals, and the treatment of melancholy. He traveled in Lorraine and produced an extensive Histoire naturelle of the region, along with many other books.

Buc'hoz died in Paris in 1807. Today he is remembered less as a single-masterpiece writer than as an energetic Enlightenment-era man of letters whose publications helped spread natural history to a broad readership.