Louis Aubert-Roche

Louis Aubert-Roche (1810-1874) was a French physician who was a specialist concerning the research of contagious diseases such as bubonic plague and typhoid fever.

Aubert-Roche is remembered for a 1840 publication titled Du typhus et de la pests en Orient (Concerning Typhus and the Pestilence in the Orient), in which he describes his medical work in North Africa and Southwestern Asia. In this book he mentions the possibilities of using hashish to treat symptoms of the plague and typhoid fever. This belief was based on his observance that Egyptians who indulged in hashish seemed to be less susceptible to diseases that affected Europeans. This book was an inspiration to psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-1884), who later used hashish in the 1840s for research of its psychoactive properties.

Aubert-Roche was not the first European physician to mention the medical possibilities of cannabis-based drugs. In 1839, William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (1809-1889} of the British East India Company published a treatise called On the Preparation of the Indian Hemp or Gunja, Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Bengal.