Chaussegros, Vital (1769- )

Material on magic and occultism.

The material is arranged in roughly chronological order.

This was previously classified as a manuscript and re-classified as an archive collection during the Wellcome Collection Systems Transformation Programme in 2026.; Collection description compiled by Christopher Hilton based upon those in the Library's published finding aid by S.A.J. Moorat.

Very little information has been found concerning the compiler of this material. He was born at Saint Symphorien le Château en Lyonnais on December 26, 1769 at 8.15 a.m. [Cf. Horoscope in MS. 1566], and his Father seems to have been Pierre Chaussegros [1735-1792], born in the same place, and killed at Speyer, probably in 1792, when that city was captured by the French Revolutionary army. [Ibid]. Vital was imprisoned in 1795 by the Committee of Public Safety [cf. MS. 1582]. Chaussegros seems to have been an ardent student of occultism and in his later works used a very strange form of semi-phonetic spelling. Albert Poisson, in the third volume of his 'Bibliothèque Hermétique [MS. No. 3936] on fol. 45, speaks of him as 'fou ou fourbe'. (68449)

Database description transcribed from S.A.J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1962-1973).