Background
Cornette was born on March 1, 1744, in Besançon, France, the ninth child of Pierre-Claude Cornette and Claude-Antoine Sauvin.
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Cornette was born on March 1, 1744, in Besançon, France, the ninth child of Pierre-Claude Cornette and Claude-Antoine Sauvin.
Cornette received his early education in the local Jesuit college. In 1760 he began studying pharmacy with a Besançon apothecary named Janson. In 1763 he went to Paris, where he studied chemistry under Macquer and Baumé and pharmacy under Guillaume-François Rouelle until 1768.
Almost nothing is known of Cornette’s life between 1768 and 1772. In the latter year he came under the powerful protection of the king’s chief physician, Joseph-Marie-François de Lassone. In Lassone’s laboratory at Marly-le-Roi he was able to carry on his own research.
He furthered his education by obtaining the title of physician from Montpellier in 1778, after about three years of study. His prominence as a scientist rose when he was named a member of the Academy of Sciences in March of the same year and when, the following year, he joined the Royal Society of Medicine, of which Lassone had been one of the founders. Also in 1779 he became an inspector of the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins. By 1784 he had become a physician to the king’s aunts, and in 1788, when Lassone died, he replaced him as the king’s chief physician. Ironically, his success forced him into exile with the royal family because of the French Revolution and he died in Rome in 1794.
Cornette’s works that deal mainly with chemistry were at first solidly in the Rouellian tradition: he followed Rouelle’s theories, as well as several questions that had long interested Rouelle himself. For example, Cornette conceived of chemical union as the adherence (sticking together) of the latus (side) of each chemical component, component, which is what Rouelle also taught. Cornette’s several memoirs on salts and their decomposition by mineral acids are strongly reminiscent of Rouelle’s important memoirs on this topic. In this study, Cornette was led to suggest corrections to the affinity tables, and his complaint that these were often too general reflects the staunch empiricism of Rouelle. Finally, his memoirs on the reaction of acids with oils, which were motivated by a prize put up by the Academy of Dijon in 1777, also relied on Rouelle’s study on the inflammation of oils.
Later on, Cornette turned his attention to chemical drugs (works on soap, mercury, etc.) at the expense of pure chemistry. This shift in emphasis may have been caused by his refusal to espouse the newer theories of Lavoisier, a refusal dictated perhaps more by personal feelings of dislike than by doctrinal convictions.
