Armand Jobert né Jobard (1812–1888) : premier aliéniste à adhérer au projet de la Société médico-psychologique et l’un des premiers abonnés aux Annales Médico-Psychologiques

Abstract

On completing his secondary education (Besançon; 1832), Armand Jobert (1812–1888) began to study medicine at the University of Paris. He graduated as an MD in 1838. In 1843, Jules Baillarger (1809–1890), Laurent Cerise (1807–1869), François Achille Longet (1811–1871) and Jacques Joseph Moreau (1804–1884) founded the review Annales Médico-Psychologiques. During their first year of publication, there was an A. Jobart who was subscribed, but there was no subscriber listed under the name of Jobert. A few months before, he gave permission to change his surname without providing the reasons or its origin. Also, he wanted to be a participant in the project to create the Société Médico-Psychologique, but this learned society would not be established until 1852. Therefore, he has never been a member of this organization, but he was the first to apply for membership, some ten years before it was founded. At the time, he was the physician-director of a private nursing home specialized in the care of those suffering from mental illness in Dole (Jura) known as La Maison des Capucins. He favored the use of ether in treating mental illness, but, he gradually moved away from questions about mental illness. During the Revolution of 1848, he left his position in Dole and moved to Paris where he cared for the insurgents and mobile guards. He proposed using ammonium hydroxide to prevent delirium tremens in the injured. Later, he was the health physician of the imperial couriers in Marseille, and then he left France. In the 1870s, Jobert was a colonization doctor at Arbah or L’Arba, near Blida in Algeria, today known as Larbaâ. At the end of his career, Jobert would later become known as the author of an important project to reform the treatment of the insane in Algeria. It is in this country, in Saint-Eugène, today Bologhine, near Algiers, that Armand François Jobert died on August 9, 1888, at the age of 78.