RC (DLC); at head of text: “À Mr. Thomas jefferson président des états unis d’amérique”; endorsed by TJ (damaged). Recorded in SJL as received 13 May 1803.

Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808), a physician and professor, wrote on medicine, public health, medical education, and philosophy. Writing to Charles Willson Peale on 13 Mch. 1808, TJ described Cabanis as the premier physician in France and the author of that country’s best works on medical topics. Before studying medicine, Cabanis was a student poet and secretary to a Polish bishop of noble birth. In the 1780s, he joined the salon of writers and thinkers, including Volney and Condorcet, that Anne Catherine de Ligneville Helvétius sponsored at Auteuil, outside Paris. He responded to the French Revolution with enthusiasm, but fell under suspicion during its most violent period. When Condorcet could not evade execution in 1794, Cabanis helped the mathematician and philosopher arrange his affairs and furnished the poison that Condorcet used to take his own life. The National Institute elected Cabanis a member in December 1795, in the category of moral and political sciences. In 1798, he became a deputy in the Council of Five Hundred. He may have taken part in the planning of the Brumaire coup in 1799, and he certainly promoted the constitutional changes that put Bonaparte into power as first consul. Cabanis promptly became a member of the Sénat. In the Institute, however, he had become affiliated with the idéologistes or idéologues, and like them he became alienated from Bonaparte’s regime beginning in 1802. On 13 July 1803, writing to Cabanis in reply to the letter printed above, TJ recalled the circle of friends that used to gather in the “delicious” village of Auteuil in the period before the French Revolution: “in those days how sanguine we were!” (Dictionnaire description begins Dictionnaire de biographie française, Paris, 1933–, 19 vols. description ends , 7:752–3; Tulard, Dictionnaire Napoléon description begins Jean Tulard, Dictionnaire Napoléon, Paris, 1987 description ends , 316–17; DSB description begins Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York, 1970–80, 16 vols. description ends ; Amable Charles, Comte de Franqueville, Le premier siècle de l’Institut de France, 25 Octobre 1795–25 Octobre 1895, 2 vols. [Paris, 1895–96], 1:120; Vol. 34:439, 441; Vol. 36:481n).

UN OUVRAGE: Cabanis’s Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, first published in Paris in a two-volume edition in 1802. The book, which was a compilation of a dozen scientific papers that Cabanis wrote in the 1790s, discussed the interrelationship of physiology, environment, and moral philosophy. TJ, impressed by Cabanis’s treatment of the problem of mind and body, later commended the book to Thomas Cooper, John Adams, and Lafayette (Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, Washington, D.C., 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends No. 1246; DSB description begins Charles C. Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York, 1970–80, 16 vols. description ends ). See also the second letter of Robert R. Livingston at 28 Oct. and the first one from Lafayette at 1 Nov.

The Abbé Martin Lefebvre de LA ROCHE had lived in a pavilion on the grounds of Madame Helvétius’s estate at Auteuil for a number of years (Franklin, Papers description begins Leonard W. Labaree and others, eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, 1959–, 39 vols. description ends , 27:590).