Félix Archimède Pouchet

Early career

Pouchet was born in Rouen, France, on August 26, 1800. His father was a respected manufacturer in Rouen. In 1827, Pouchet received his M.D. in Paris, and later became the director of the Rouen Museum of Natural History. He also held a chair at one of the local medical preparatory colleges in Rouen in the field of zoology, and in 1843, he received the Legion of Honour.

In 1830, botanists A.Rich. ex DC. published Pouchetia, a genus of flowering plants from Africa, belonging to the family Rubiaceae. It was named in Felix's honour.

Pouchet had extensive experience in the field of traditional biology before the debate, where his main interest was animal generation. In the 1840s, he published two scientific articles. Both publications seemed to contradict his eventual support of spontaneous generation. In these publications, he believed that in the animal kingdom, generation happened through eggs that existed before fertilization. He also demonstrated reservations in spontaneous generation by supporting the beliefs of Christian Ehrenberg. Ehrenberg believed that infusoria had complex organ systems while other protozoologists, like Fèlix Dujardin, believed that infusoria were simple organisms that could appear spontaneously. Pouchet did not seem very interested in spontaneous generation during this time, and instead studied ovule production and menstruation.

It is unclear why Pouchet shifted his interest to spontaneous generation, but in December 1858, Pouchet presented results to the French Academy of Sciences of two experiments he conducted that he claimed supported the notion of spontaneous generation. He said that his results were the opposite of Theodore Schwann’s results that demonstrated spontaneous generation did not exist. Schwann observed that after heating oxygen in a vessel, which was thought to be important for spontaneous generation, no microorganisms grew. He said that this was a result of the germs in the oxygen or air being destroyed by the heat. Pouchet claimed that when he did Schwann's experiment, microorganisms did grow, and thus germs in the air did not produce microorganisms. His experiments did not receive a positive reaction from the academy. Most of them thought his experiments were conducted poorly and that he did not effectively control for the intrusion of germs. 1. The human species and mammiferae are subjected to the same fundamental laws. As the subtitle makes clear, the work centres on Albertus Magnus, the 13th-century Dominican friar who was famous for his work on botany and astrology. In the work, Pouchet divides the history of Western science into three epochs: Greek, Roman and Christian. This was part of a general rewriting of Western intellectual history to mythologise it as a single inevitable progress towards the modern age. Pouchet also wrote a work titled L'univers: les infiniment grands et les infiniment petits, which detailed the richness of the earth's life forms within the context of the divine universe as a whole.