Guillaume Rondelet - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Rondelet was born in Montpellier in 1507. His father was an aromatius, a combination of pharmacist, grocer and druggist. Both parents died while he was a child and he was brought up in the care of his elder brother and sister, who was the wealthy widow of a merchant from Florence. He was educated in Montpellier and was enrolled at the city's university before being sent to Paris in 1525, where he studied at the Collège de Sorbonne.

He matriculated in 1529 and returned to Montpellier; having developed an interest in medicine, he joined the Faculty of Medicine at his home town's university. He became procurator (Student Registrar) within a year. He became friends around this time with a fellow physician, François Rabelais, who later wrote La vie de Gargantua et Pantagruel in which Rondelet is satirised under the thinly disguised alias of "Rondibilis". In October 1529, while serving as procurator, Rondelet expelled the newly enrolled Nostradamus from the university for being an apothecary and slandering doctors.

Rondelet moved to Pertuis in the Vaucluse after gaining his medical degree from Montpellier and tried to supplement his income by teaching local children, but met with little success. He went back to Paris to learn Greek and to study anatomy, again supporting himself through teaching. He practised for a while as a medical doctor at Maringues in the Auvergne before returning to Montpellier in 1537. There he finished his doctorate and married Jeanne Sandre the following year. The couple lived with Jeanne's family for the next seven years.

His medical practice was not a success. He managed his finances badly and he outraged the citizens of Montpellier when he publicly dissected his infant son in an attempt to determine the cause of death. He became a teacher with the medical faculty in 1539 but the arrival of plague in Montpellier a few years later meant that he found himself with almost nobody to teach; only three students were left by 1543.