Ambroise Auguste Tardieu

Life & Legacy

Auguste Ambroise Tardieu (10 March 1818 – 12 January 1879) was a French medical doctor and the pre-eminent forensic medical scientist of the mid-19th century.
The son of artist and mapmaker Ambroise Tardieu, he achieved his Doctorate in Medicine at the Faculté de Médecine of Paris. He was President of the French Academy of Medicine, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Paris.
Tardieu's specialties were forensic medicine and toxicology. Over his 23-year career, Tardieu participated as a forensic expert in 5,238 cases, including many famous and notorious historical crimes. Using his cases as a statistical base, Tardieu wrote over a dozen volumes of forensic analysis, covering such diverse areas as abortion, drowning, hanging, insanity, homosexuality, poisoning, suffocation, syphilis, and tattoos. In recognition of his first clinical descriptions of battered children, battered child syndrome is also known as Tardieu's syndrome. Tardieu's ecchymoses, subpleural spots of ecchymosis that follow the death of a newborn child by strangulation or suffocation, were first described by Tardieu in 1859, and were so named in his honor.