Website review: François Bernier - Wikipedia, the ...
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•en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Bernier
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AlokeKumar discovered 2 months ago- François Bernier (1625-1688) François Bernier was a French physician and traveler, born at Joué-Etiau. For 12 years he was the personal physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in India. His 1684 publication Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l'habitant is considered the first published post-Classical classification of humans into distinct races. He wrote Travels in the Mughal Empire, which is mainly about the reigns of Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. A son of farmers, François Bernier, was orphaned very young and was cared for by his uncle, the curé de Chanzeaux. At age 15, he moved to Paris to study at the Collège de Clermont (the future Lycée Louis-le-Grand) where he was invited to stay at the home of his younger friend Chapelle, the natural son of Luillier who was a counselor at the parliament in Metz. There Bernier most probably met Cyrano de Bergerac and Molière, and certainly the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), whose aide and secretary he became. He developed a taste for travel (1647) in the company of monsieur d'Arpajon, the French ambassador to Poland and Germany. In 1652 during a prolonged stay with Gassendi in the south of France, he managed to become a medical doctor on the strength of a speed-course at the famous Faculté de Montpellier: an intensive three-month course gave the medical degree providing one did not practice on French national territory.Liberated from his ties to France by the death of Gassendi (1655) he set out on his twelve-year journey to the East, at 36 years of age: Palestine, Egypt, one year in Cairo, Arabia, Ethiopia. In 1658 he debarked at Surat in India, in Gujarat state. Attached at first and for a short while to the retinue of Dara Shikoh -- the history of whose downfall he was to record -- he was installed as a medical doctor at the court of Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors. A tour of inspection by Aurangzeb (1664-1665) gave Bernier the opportunity to describe Kashmir, the first and for a long time the only European to do so. In: "Voyages de F. Bernier (angevin) contenant la description des Etats du Grand Mogol, de l'Indoustan, du royaume de Kachemire" (David-Paul Maret ed., Amsterdam, 1699).After his return from Kashmir, he traveled around on his own, meeting with Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in Bengal and -- while preparing for a journey to Persia at Surat -- with Jean Chardin, that other great traveler in the Orient (1666). In 1669 Bernier left India for Paris, to stay.In 1671 he almost was jailed for writing in defense of the ideas of René Descartes, against whom a judicial arrest had been issued. Bernier died in 1688, the year that saw the publication of his "Lettre sur le quiétisme des Indes". This spot is for Michele from Florida, USA, who likes to travel. For more on her visit : http://meesha7.stumbleupon.com/
