Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc (Le Clerc)

Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc (Le Clerc; October 6. 1726 - December 30, 1798) was a French physician, writer, and cartographer. An Enlightenment scholar, he was also a partisan of absolute monarchy: an irony, since the administrative caprice of the French court served him with lifelong torment and neglect. His family were doctors, and consequently his early education and career were in medicine; he was appointed first physician of the King's armies in 1757, an office he exercised by reforming administrative abuses in the army's hospitals. He was sent to Russia at the request of Empress Elizabeth I, where General Kirill Razumovsky chose him to be his personal physician. He attended Razumovsky on a tour throughout Europe's courts. He was offered ownership of the town of Baturin, a dubious reward Le Clerc refused, as it amounted to lifelong exile in Russia. After a short sojourn in France, however, he nonetheless returned to Russia, where he was made First Physician to the Grand Duke. He was sent with another purpose by Louis XV: to research a history of Russia, a subject on which western Europe was deeply ignorant. Le Clerc returned to France in 1777 heavily laden with texts and maps, many produced at his own expense - unfortunately, he found his assignment forgotten, and his hoped-for support not forthcoming. His efforts in hospital reform were briefly remembered, and he was recalled in 1778 to Versailles to continue that work; upon submitting his report on proposed hospital improvements, his work would again be shelved and forgotten. Meanwhile, he continued to labor on his history of Russia, and completed it just in time for the French Revolution (1789 - 1799). His pension disappeared. At his death in 1798, he was an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg; at home, his position as a Knight of the King's Order no longer provided any benefit.

Nicolas-Gabriel Clerc is also known as: Le Clerc