Pelletier and Caventou: Life and Times

Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (1788–1842) and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou (1795–1877) are remembered almost always as a pair, and almost always for one thing: in 1820 they drew quinine, the active alkaloid of cinchona bark, out of the bark as a pure substance. Behind the famous double name stand two quite different lives. Pelletier was born into a Paris family of pharmacists and grew up in the shadow of the new chemistry of Lavoisier; Caventou came to Paris from Saint-Omer in the far north of France and made his early career as a hospital pharmacist. For about five years, from 1817 to the early 1820s, their work together changed what a medicine from a plant could be.

This page tells the story of the two men rather than of their chemistry. It follows Pelletier’s family background and training, Caventou’s route from Saint-Omer to the Saint-Antoine hospital, the world of Paris pharmacy after the Revolution, how the partnership formed, and what each man did after the great discoveries: Pelletier as professor, assistant director of the École de pharmacie and member of the Académie des sciences, Caventou as academician and professor of toxicology. It closes with their honours, their deaths, and the ways France has remembered them — a monument that was destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt, a postage stamp, and a crater on the Moon. The discoveries themselves appear here only as milestones; they are told in full on The Discovery of Quinine (1820) and Cinchona and the Plant Alkaloids of Pelletier and Caventou.

Table of Contents

  1. A Family of Paris Pharmacists
  2. Caventou: From Saint-Omer to the Saint-Antoine Hospital
  3. Pharmacy and Chemistry in Post-Revolutionary Paris
  4. Forming a Partnership (1817)
  5. Five Busy Years of Discovery, in Brief
  6. Pelletier’s Later Career and the Académie des Sciences
  7. Caventou, Professor of Toxicology
  8. The Montyon Prize and Other Honours
  9. Deaths and Reputations
  10. Monuments, a Stamp and a Lunar Crater
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. A Family of Paris Pharmacists

Pierre-Joseph Pelletier was born in Paris in 1788, the year before the Revolution began. (The sources disagree on the exact day, giving either March or April, so it is left out here.) Pharmacy ran in the family. His grandfather, also named Bertrand Pelletier (1729–1784), was a master apothecary in Bayonne, in the south-west of France. His father, Bertrand Pelletier (1761–1797), was a pharmacist and chemist in Paris and one of the men who took up the new chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier — the chemistry of elements, oxygen and careful weighing that replaced the old theory of “phlogiston” in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

The father died in 1797, when Pierre-Joseph was about nine years old, so the boy did not have long to learn at his side. But he inherited a trade, a name that was known among Paris chemists, and a way of thinking: in the Lavoisier tradition, a plant or a drug was something that could be taken apart, weighed and explained, not simply a remedy whose powers were handed down by custom.

Pelletier trained as a pharmacist in Paris and received his pharmacy qualification from the École de pharmacie in 1810. Two years later, in 1812, he took a doctorate in sciences with a thesis on the gum-resins — the sticky mixtures of gum and resin that ooze from certain plants and had long been used in medicine (Essai sur la nature des substances connues sous le nom de gommes résines). The subject is telling. Gum-resins are exactly the kind of messy natural material that the new chemistry tried to separate into its parts, and it was this habit of separating plant materials into their components that would later make his name.

In 1815 he joined the teaching staff of the École de pharmacie as assistant professor of natural history. The post gave him a place in the scientific life of the city and a link to the school that trained and examined the pharmacists of France.

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2. Caventou: From Saint-Omer to the Saint-Antoine Hospital

Joseph Bienaimé Caventou was born on 30 June 1795 in Saint-Omer, a town in the Pas-de-Calais in northern France, about seven years after Pelletier. Like many ambitious young men from the provinces, he came to Paris to study, and he followed courses at the École de pharmacie and at the Faculté des sciences.

In 1816 he entered the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, in the east of Paris, as its pharmacist. A hospital pharmacy of the time was a busy workshop that prepared the medicines for the wards, and for Caventou it had one particular advantage: access to a laboratory. A young pharmacist without a private shop or a family fortune could not easily set up a chemical laboratory of his own; a hospital post gave him one.

Caventou was therefore in a different position from Pelletier when they met. He was younger, he had no family name in the profession, and he worked in a public hospital rather than in a teaching school. What he did have was skill at the bench and a place to use it. The pairing of an established pharmacist-teacher with a younger hospital chemist turned out to be a productive one.

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3. Pharmacy and Chemistry in Post-Revolutionary Paris

The Paris in which the two men trained was, in the years after the Revolution and under Napoleon, one of the great centres of chemistry and medicine in the world. The old guild of apothecaries had given way to a state school of pharmacy, the École de pharmacie, which trained and examined pharmacists and gave its professors a public platform. The Académie des sciences, re-founded within the new Institut, heard papers read aloud by its members and by younger researchers, and appointed commissioners to judge them. Hospitals such as Saint-Antoine employed salaried pharmacists. Chemistry was taught as a science of analysis: take a substance apart, identify its components, and describe them.

Several of the leading chemists of the day were themselves pharmacists or closely tied to pharmacy. When Pelletier and Caventou read their memoir on cinchona to the Académie des sciences in 1820, the commissioners named in the memoir to examine it were Vauquelin, Thénard and Deyeux — the senior chemists of Paris, and the men whose judgement a young pharmacist most needed. The physiologist François Magendie, who tested new substances on animals and then in patients, worked in the same circles; he and Pelletier published together in 1817.

The question that occupied many of these men was simple to state and hard to answer: what, exactly, is the active part of a medicinal plant? Opium, ipecacuanha root, the seeds of the nux vomica tree and cinchona bark were all powerful drugs, but each was a complex natural material that varied from batch to batch. The French historian of pharmacy Fournier, following the nineteenth-century chemist Chevreul, describes a first era of alkaloid chemistry that began with Derosne’s work on opium in 1803, continued through Seguin and Sertürner’s morphine, and closed around 1820 with Pelletier and Caventou, Robiquet, and Gomes of Lisbon. Sertürner’s demonstration that opium contained an alkaline, salt-forming principle — morphine — opened the door. The young Paris pharmacists walked through it.

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4. Forming a Partnership (1817)

The partnership took shape in 1817. By then Pelletier, at about twenty-nine, was already a doctor of science and an assistant professor at the École de pharmacie; Caventou, at twenty-two, had been the pharmacist of the Saint-Antoine hospital for about a year. Their first joint work concerned the green colouring matter of leaves. In a paper of 1817 and a note of 1818 they isolated and studied this pigment and gave it the name that is still used today, in French chlorophyle — chlorophyll, from the Greek words for “pale green” and “leaf”. A 2024 article in Photosynthesis Research by Govindjee, Stirbet, Lindsey and Scheer traced this first use of the word to the two papers and published English translations of them.

The same year, 1817, Pelletier also worked with Magendie on ipecacuanha root and its active substance, which they named emetine. That work was Pelletier’s with Magendie, not with Caventou, although some later summaries give it to the pair; the Garrison–Morton bibliography of medical history lists it under Pelletier and Magendie.

How exactly the two men divided their work is not recorded in the sources gathered for this page. What the record does show is the pattern of their papers: from 1817 onwards they published one joint memoir after another, under both names, with Pelletier’s name first. The habit of joint authorship lasted through their most productive years and fixed the double name “Pelletier and Caventou” in the history of chemistry.

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5. Five Busy Years of Discovery, in Brief

Between 1817 and 1821 the partners isolated or described a remarkable run of plant substances. In outline (each is explained on the wing’s other pages):

Elemental analyses published in 1823 showed that these alkaloids contain nitrogen, a basic fact on which later alkaloid chemistry was built. The quinine memoir was the one that mattered most to medicine. Within a few years quinine sulfate, a pure salt that could be weighed out exactly, was being made in quantity in France and soon abroad, and physicians were testing it in fever patients. The partners did not patent their process; they published it — and, as a plain matter of record, they also went on to manufacture quinine sulfate themselves. The story of that decision is told on The Discovery of Quinine (1820).

The historians Ségal and Trépardoux have shown how quickly this chemistry reached prescribing. Magendie’s Formulaire, a handbook for physicians that went through nine issues between 1821 and 1836, was built around the new pure alkaloids — strychnine, quinine and morphine — drawing on the work of Pelletier, Caventou and others, and described animal tests of their activity and safety.

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6. Pelletier’s Later Career and the Académie des Sciences

After the great years of discovery Pelletier’s career followed the path of the Paris scientific establishment. At the École de pharmacie he rose from assistant professor of natural history (1815) to full professor in 1827, and in 1832 he became its assistant director (directeur adjoint). He continued to analyse plant substances and published analyses of several alkaloids. He also worked with other chemists, among them the Polish chemist Filip Neriusz Walter.

Alongside teaching, Pelletier ran a business. He manufactured quinine sulfate on an industrial scale, with a factory outside Paris; the sources disagree about how much his works produced, and no output figure is given here. The commercial side of quinine was not hidden; it sat alongside the decision not to patent the process, which left any other pharmacist or manufacturer free to make the drug too.

The crowning honour of his scientific life came in 1840, when he was elected to the Académie des sciences — the same body before which he and Caventou had read the quinine memoir twenty years earlier. Membership placed him among the leading scientists of France.

A further mark of his standing came after his death. When the French chemist Charles Tanret later isolated an alkaloid from the bark of the pomegranate tree, he named it pelletierine in Pelletier’s honour, according to the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia’s biography.

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7. Caventou, Professor of Toxicology

Caventou’s recognition came early. In 1821, at about twenty-six, he was elected to the Académie royale de médecine, the national body of physicians, surgeons and pharmacists founded the previous year. It was an unusual honour for so young a man and reflected the reputation the alkaloid work had already earned.

His teaching career was at the École de pharmacie, where he became professor of toxicology in 1835 and held the chair until he retired in 1859 — almost a quarter of a century. Toxicology, the science of poisons, was a natural subject for him. Several of the substances he had helped to isolate — strychnine, brucine and veratrine among them — are strong poisons, and the nineteenth century was the period in which chemists first learned to detect plant poisons in the body and to give evidence about them in court. A professor of toxicology trained pharmacists to recognise poisons, understand their action and identify them by chemical tests.

Caventou lived through the reigns of Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis-Philippe, the Second Republic, the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic. He outlived his partner by thirty-five years and saw quinine become a standard medicine across the world.

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8. The Montyon Prize and Other Honours

In 1827 the Académie des sciences awarded Pelletier and Caventou jointly a Montyon prize of 10,000 francs for the discovery of quinine and its sulfate. The Montyon prizes were funded by a bequest of the philanthropist Baron de Montyon. To receive one for quinine was, in effect, the Académie’s formal verdict that the 1820 work had been of real benefit. A letter by the two men referring to the Montyon competition of 1828 was reprinted in 1951 in a special issue of the Revue du paludisme et de médecine tropicale.

Other state honours followed. Pelletier was made an officer of the Légion d’honneur in 1828, and Caventou in 1845. Pelletier’s election to the Académie des sciences (1840) and Caventou’s election to the Académie de médecine (1821) were, for scientists of their time, honours of the same order.

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9. Deaths and Reputations

Pelletier died on 19 July 1842, aged fifty-four, in the Paris area. (Sources differ on whether he died in Paris itself or at Clichy, the town just outside the city where his factory stood.) His death came only two years after his election to the Académie des sciences.

Caventou died on 5 May 1877 in Paris, in the rue de La Sourdière in the 1st arrondissement, at the age of eighty-one. He was buried in the northern cemetery of Saint-Mandé, just east of Paris. (One short tribute indexed in PubMed, the 1994 note by Haas, prints his dates in its title as 1795–1887; the year of death in that title is an error.)

Their reputation has rested above all on the 1820 memoir. For historians of chemistry, the pair mark the point at which the first era of alkaloid chemistry reached its height: after them, the idea that a plant drug owes its effect to a definite, isolable substance was no longer a hypothesis but a working method. For historians of medicine, they are the men who turned cinchona bark, a variable and bulky natural remedy, into a medicine that could be measured by weight. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century tributes continue to appear — in 1951 the chemist Marcel Delépine wrote a biographical article on them for the Journal of Chemical Education, and short history notes have appeared in neurology, internal medicine and photosynthesis journals.

The quinine story has also been retold as one of scientific generosity, because they did not patent their discovery. The sources assembled for this wing support the plain facts — they published their method and did not take a patent, and they also manufactured quinine sulfate commercially — and this page leaves it there.

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10. Monuments, a Stamp and a Lunar Crater

In 1900 a monument to Pelletier and Caventou was unveiled in Paris, on the boulevard Saint-Michel in the 5th arrondissement. It was paid for by an international subscription — a sign of how widely quinine was by then valued. The historian of pharmacy Guy Devaux has written about its subscribers from the Gironde.

The monument did not survive the Second World War. During the German occupation of Paris it was destroyed; a 1946 notice in the Revue du paludisme et de médecine tropicale gives the year as 1941. In 1946 the historian of pharmacy Urdang wrote about the monument in Science, and a replacement was set up in 1951, at the site now known as the place Louis-Marin.

In 1970, the 150th anniversary of the discovery of quinine, the French post office issued a stamp in honour of the two pharmacists. Its issue was noted in the Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie and, in 2001, in the Journal of the Association of Physicians of India; in 2020 the Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie marked the stamp’s fiftieth anniversary.

Caventou’s name has also been given to a crater on the Moon, the lunar crater Caventou.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Haas LF. Pierre Joseph Pelletier (1788-1842) and Jean Bienaime Caventou (1795-1887). J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1994;57(11):1333. PubMed PMID: 7964807
  2. Delepine M. Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou. J Chem Educ. 1951;28(9):454. DOI: 10.1021/ed028p454
  3. Govindjee G, Stirbet A, Lindsey JS, Scheer H. On the Pelletier and Caventou (1817, 1818) papers on chlorophyll and beyond. Photosynth Res. 2024;160(1):55-60. PubMed PMID: 38488941
  4. Pelletier, Caventou. Ueber ein neues in der falschen Angustura-Rinde aufgefundenes Pflanzen-Alkali (Brucin). Ann Phys. 1819;63(11):322-338. DOI: 10.1002/andp.18190631107
  5. Karamanou M, Tsoucalas G, Pantos K, Androutsos G. Isolating Colchicine in 19th Century: An Old Drug Revisited. Curr Pharm Des. 2018;24(6):654-658. PubMed PMID: 29336251
  6. Fournier J. [Alcaloids discovery, markers for the history of organic chemistry]. Rev Hist Pharm (Paris). 2001;49(331):315-32. PubMed PMID: 11776272
  7. Ségal A, Trépardoux F. [The Formulaires of Magendie (1821-1840) of the chemical pharmacy to pharmacology]. Hist Sci Med. 2015;49(2):141-56. PubMed PMID: 26492670
  8. Pai-Dhungat JV. Caventou, Pelletier &--History Of Quinine. J Assoc Physicians India. 2015;63(3):58. PubMed PMID: 26540843
  9. Pelletier J, Caventou J. [A letter referring to the 1828 competition for the Montyon award]. Rev Palud Med Trop. 1951;Spec. No.:40-8. PubMed PMID: 14912761
  10. [Re-establishment of the monument erected in 1900 by international subscription to the memory of Pelletier and Caventou and destroyed by the Germans in 1941]. Rev Palud Med Trop. 1946;15(4):185. PubMed PMID: 20992688
  11. Urdang G. The Pelletier and Caventou Monument in Paris. Science. 1946;103(2662):25. PubMed PMID: 17742674
  12. Devaux G. Le monument à Pelletier et Caventou : ses souscripteurs girondins. Rev Hist Pharm. 2005;93(345):136-142. DOI: 10.3406/pharm.2005.5787
  13. Paidhungat JV. Postage stamp of France released in 1970 on 150th anniversary of discovery of quinine. J Assoc Physicians India. 2001;49:1093. PubMed PMID: 11868863
  14. Lefebvre T. Il y a cinquante ans, un timbre en hommage à Pelletier et Caventou ! Rev Hist Pharm. 2020;107(405):94-97. DOI: 10.3406/pharm.2020.24001

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Pelletier+Caventou
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Pelletier+Caventou+quinine+history
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=history+of+pharmacy+Paris+nineteenth+century
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=alkaloid+discovery+history

Further Reading

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Connections

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