Des disciples méconnus de Jean-Étienne Esquirol : Jean-Baptiste Delaye (1789-1878), André-Pamphile Rech (1793-1853), Antoine-Marie Chambeyron (1797-1851)

Although Jean-Étienne Esquirol (1772-1840) was never a professor at the Faculté de médecine in Paris, he attracted a circle of disciples, most of whom went on to become famous contributors to French psychiatric knowledge during the nineteenth century. However, some of them were never as well known as their colleagues, perhaps because they pursued their medical careers outside of Paris. What follows are brief biographies of three of them: Jean-Baptiste Delaye (1789-1878), André-Pamphile Rech (1793-1853) and Antoine-Marie Chambeyron (1797-1851). While none of these physicians made an essential contribution to the medicine of mental illness, each of them played a decisive role in improving treatment centres as well as the care provided to “the deranged” in the areas of France where they worked. This they accomplished by applying the principles of “moral treatment” developed by Philippe Pinel, who took inspiration from eighteenth-century philosophers and “La Révolution française”.