Ruel, Jean (1474? – 1537)

« Hippiâtre et médecin français, né vers 1474, mort en 1537. Il fut médecin de François Ier et traduisit en latin, d’après les ordres de ce souverain, les manuscrits grecs de l’Hippiatrique. » Mennessier de La Lance (1915-1921)

« Jean Ruelle was born in 1474 in Soissons, and died in 1537. He was self-taught and fluent in Greek and Latin. Although very few details of his life are available, it is known that he studied medicine at Paris. In 1508 he was appointed professor and was sometime Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris. The following year he became physician to King Francis I. Ruelle married and had children, but after the death of his wife he gave up the practice of medicine and, through the generosity of Bishop Poncher, was appointed canon of the church of Notre Dame in Paris. All the leisure of this office he devoted to the classics. Ruelle was a friend of Guillaume Budé, and in the brilliant purity of his Latin style he was considered his superior, a judgment amply supported by his excellent Latin version of the Greek of Dioscorides. Budé himself called him ‘l’aigle des interprètes’. He has made a number of important translations of medical and botalical works for which he acquire a very considerable reputation. He published a Latin translation of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica in 1529 and followed this up in 1536 with De Natura Stirpium. Both works are elegantly written, furnishing many new vernacular plant names. The plant genus Ruellia is named after him. Although Ruel’s works are compilations of the works of earlier authors, they are notable examples of the first attempts to popularize botany and veterinary medicine (De natura stirpium (Paris, 1536).
Ruelle was also the court physician to King Francis I, who was renowned as a man of letters. Not only did Francis support a number of major writers of the period, he was a poet himself.
Being at the same time a botanist, physician, horse doctor, and philologist who devoted his life to restore the original texts of the ancient writers on medicine, to translate and comment upon these texts, and finally to publish them, Francis asked Ruelle to translate into Latin all the existing ancient Greek texts and text fragments on horse medicine that were collected by an anonymous author in the 10th century, specifically during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959), and were circulating in many manuscripts with the title Hippiatrica. Some scholars, however, argue for a late antique date of compilation and a tenth-century revision of the text. This type of excerpt collection, offered the advantage of ease of use and made a range of material more accessible : professionals needed easily usable reference works. The text offers precious information on a range of veterinary subjects, especially the materia medica that veterinary writers presumed available to the horse doctor, among them saffron, myrrh, and cassia. Such exotic substances were in common use to treat wounds or to fumigate stalls.
Ruel published his extended translations under the title Veterinariae medicinae libri duo in 1530. Jean Ruel’s translation from the Greek of this important compilation of veterinary texts, is the first book in any language of the oldest known veterinary works, making available for the first time to the general reading public a collection of the surviving works of all the Greek veterinary authors of antiquity. The success of this volume resulted in the publication of the original Hippiatrica in Greek seven years later in Basel by Joh. Walder in 1537 (a modern edition was made in 1807). The first book of this collection, comprising 58 chapters, contains a scholarly glossary composed by Pierre Ruelle, the brother of Jean. The Veterinariae medicinae is translated into French by Jean Massé and published by Charles Perier in 1563. A translation into Italian followed in 1543, and a German translation in 1571 (second edition in 1575). » Dejager (2014)