Antoine François Joseph Raikem

The royal decree of December 5, 1835 organizes the curriculum of university courses and creates new courses, including pathological anatomy, which will be taught in Liège by Antoine François Joseph Raikem, until his emeritus. Raikem attached great importance to medical ethics, hygiene and public health.

Born in Liège in 1783, Antoine François Joseph Raikem, whose father had been physician to the last prince-bishop of Liège, was soon inspired by the same vocation. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine in Paris (1807), he temporarily practiced his art there - as a doctor for the Montreuil charity office, and as a doctor for the National Guard - before being appointed by Napoleon as physician to the children of his sister Elisa Bonaparte, who had become Princess of Lucca and Piombino. Raikem remained in her service when she became Grand Duchess of Tuscany and moved to Florence, where he married one of her attendants, Maria-Luisa Corsi.

After the fall of the Empire, Raikem obtained a post in Volterra, where a typhus epidemic was raging and where he ended up managing the hospitals and the saltworks sanitary service. After more than fifteen years in Italy, Raikem was appointed professor at the University of Liège, and returned to his home town in 1836 to teach courses in pathological anatomy and hygiene. A member of numerous learned societies, he became a correspondent of the French Royal Academy of Medicine (1835), then a full member of the Belgian Academy from 1841 to 1856. His inaugural address, delivered at the end of his term as Rector of the University of Liège (1843-1844), testifies to his advanced thinking on medical ethics and deontology.

In addition to his research in the field of anatomy - he strove to pass on to his colleagues the knowledge he had acquired in Italy - Raikem was also a member of the Conseil de Salubrité Publique (Province of Liège), and showed a keen interest in archaeology (Roman baths at Volterra). He died in Liège in 1862.