NEW INSIGHTS INTO LIFE AND DEATH OF THE SELF-STYLED ESTONIAN EMBRYOLOGIST, LOUIS SÉBASTIEN MARIE DE TREDERN DE LÉZEREC (1780–1818)

Abstract

1. Introduction Louis Sebastien Marie de Tredern de Lezerec was born on September 14, 1780, in Brest (Brittany, France). His father Jean Louis de T. de L. (1742-1807) had been a captain in the French Navy during the American War of Independence, then served as director of the Royal Marine Academy in Brest. Both of them emigrated to St. Petersburg (Russia) near the end of the French Revolution, in 1796. It is known that the young Tredern was recruited (1797) as a midshipman on board the Pimen in Reval harbour (now Tallinn) in Estonia, then a province of the Russian Empire. Pimen was a battleship of the Azia-class, with 66 guns, built in 1789 (Veselago 1872). If it really was broken up in 1799, then L. S. M. de Tredern should have been transferred to another ship for the next two years, but we lack information. Direct testimonies have established that L. S. M. de Tredern, interested in comparative anatomy and embryology, had transformed his cabin into a dissection room, in which he studied the embryonic development of hen eggs (Baer 1874, Beetschen 1995, Huard et al. 1963, Stieda 1901). Baer himself (1874) stressed that (we translate): The citizens of Reval had kept this [apparently] useless work in mind, but they had forgotten [Tredern's] name. In 1801, captain de Tredern was removed from the list of emigres by Bonaparte. In August, he came back to France, where he died in Quimper, in Brittany, a few years later, in 1807. His son had accompanied him to France, but it was not known where Louis Sebastien had spent the following two years before he went to Germany, to Wurzburg, where he enrolled at the University as a medical student (October 30, 1804). There he studied with Ignaz Dollinger (Baumer-Schleinkofer 1993). In 1807, Louis Sebastien moved to Gottingen and presented the results of his previous studies on chick embryo development, along with the many drawings he had produced to illustrate them, to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Blumenbach advised him to use only part of them for submitting his thesis, and to analyze the former authors' works on the topic. However, Tredern decided to complete several observations on the incubated egg and, working relentlessly, he summarized his results in a fairly short thesis (Fig. 1) that he decided to submit to Jena University, on April 4, 1808 (Tredern 1808). Tredern might have been attracted to Jena by the recent appointment of Lorenz Oken to a professorship, and relations between them are ascertained (see Baer's passage quoted further on). Tredern later returned to Gottingen in autumn and resumed his work on bird embryos during the following winter (Beetschen 1995, Huard et al.1963, Stieda 1901). Nothing was still known about Tredern's life between March of 1809, when he left Gottingen again, and July of 1811, when he enrolled in Paris for a second medical thesis, dedicated to the building and organization of new hospitals. thesis was submitted on August 20, 1811 (Tredern 1811). Again, nothing was known about Tredern after this date, in spite of Baer's stubborn efforts to find traces of him during the 19th century (Baer 1836a, 1836b, 1867, 1874, Stieda 1901). Baer himself had studied in Wurzburg with Ignaz Dollinger for one year in 1815/1816 and there he chose to become an anatomist (Raikov 1968:35-39). When Baer found Tredern's thesis, Dollinger told him that he should know the author, who came from Estonia like him. This assertion first led Baer to the wrong track since he did not succeed in finding any Tredern family in Estonia during the following years. Later on, Baer searched for witnesses who might have met Tredern, by publishing announcements in a German Baltic newspaper (Baer 1836a, 1836b). He thus obtained information about the presence of Tredern in the Baltic Fleet at Reval. In 1867, he repeated this search for witnesses in another German newspaper (Baer 1867), and found new testimonies from people who had met Tredern in Reval or in Gottingen. …