Charles robert richet

Charles Robert Richet (Paris, August 25, 1850 - Paris, December 4, 1935) was a French physician and physiologist. Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1913 in recognition of his work on anaphylaxis

Biography

Son of Alfredo Richet and his wife Eugenia. She studied in his hometown, graduating as a Doctor of Medicine in 1869, a Doctor of Science in 1878 and, like his father, a professor, in this case of the Chair of Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris from 1887.

For 24 years, from 1878 to 1902, he was editor of the Scientific Magazine and from 1917, co-editor of the Journal of Physiology and General Pathology. He published articles on physiology, chemistry, experimental pathology.

In physiology, he worked on the mechanisms of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animals. Prior to his (1885-1895) research on polypnea and tremor due to temperatures, little was known about the methods by which animals deprived of their skin perspiration could protect themselves from excess heat and how chilled animals could warm themselves..

In experimental therapeutics, Richet demonstrated that the blood of animals vaccinated against an infection protects against it (November 1888). Applying these principles to tuberculosis, he made the first serotherapeutic injection in man, on December 6, 1890.

He invented the word anaphylaxis to designate the sensitivity developed by an organism after receiving a parenteral injection of a colloid, protein substance or toxin (1902), thus being able to affirm that the parenteral injection of protein substances profoundly and permanently modifies the chemical constitution of bodily fluids.

The applications of anaphylaxis in medicine are extremely numerous. Later he demonstrated the phenomena of Passive Anaphylaxis and in vitro Anaphylaxis. Most of Charles Richet's physiology works, published in various scientific journals, were compiled and published in Travaux du Laboratoire de la Faculté de Médecine de Paris (Alcan, Paris, 6 vols. 1890 -1911).

Professor of Physiology and professor at the Sorbonne, member of the Institute of France, president of the Biological Society, on December 11, 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on anaphylaxis.

After the First World War he was appointed vice president of the Eugenics Society of France, contributing with his prestige to popularize eugenic theories among the French population. In Sélection humaine , written in 1912 and published in 1919, he successfully presented his ideas; from a biological reductionism, and although he did not deny environmental influences, he maintained that genetic inheritance was the key factor in human existence. With openly racist and supremacist ideas ("I don't believe at all in the equality of the human races"), he encouraged racial hierarchization (he presented blacks as close to monkeys), the prohibition of marriages between whites and women of other races (as well as among other categories of people: inferior, deformed, criminals, maniacs or imbeciles), the elimination of newborns with physical defects, and the castration and sterilization of degenerate adults.

Richet was also one of the most representative pioneers of the research called metapsychic in his time, a term later replaced by the one coined by Max Dessoir: parapsychology. Richet published his conclusions in his voluminous Treatise on Metapsychics. Forty years of psychic work, as well as in The future and the premonition, both translated into Spanish by the ed. Araluce: in 1923 the first, with a laudatory prologue by the Spanish immunologist Jaime Ferrán, and in 1932 the second.

He also devoted part of his time to writing works of dramatic art.

Work

Richet's works on parapsychological topics, which dominated his later years, include:

• Traité de Métapsychique (Treaty of Metapsychica)1922),
• Notre Sixième Sens (Our Sixth Sentence)1928),
• L'Avenir et la Prémonition (The Future and Premonition1931)
• The Great Spread (The Great Hope)1933).
• Maxwell, J & Richet, C. Metapsychical Phenomena: Methods and Observations (London: Duckworth, 1905).
• Richet, C. Physiologie Travaux du Laboratoire (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1909)
• Richet, C. The Sélection Humaine (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1919)
• Richet, C. Traité De Métapsychique (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1922).
• Richet, C. Thirty Years of Psychical Research (New York: The Macmillan Co. 1923).
• Richet, C. Our Sixth Sense (London: Rider, 1928).