Jean R.C. Quoy was a French naval surgeon, zoologist and anatomist. From 1806 he studied medicine at the School of Naval Medicine in Rochefort, then served as an assistant surgeon on a journey to the Antilles during 1808-1809. He qualified as medical doctor (MD) in 1814 at Montpellier and during 1814-1815 served as surgeon-major on a trip to Réunion. On this voyage he was asked to collect natural history specimens, which he also described, thus developing an interest in natural history.
During 1817-1820 Quoy and Joseph P. Gaimard* served together as surgeons and naturalists on the Uranie as part of the scientific expedition around the world led by Louis C.D. de Freycinet*. During the voyage they collected many zoological specimens, including sea fishes at the Cape in 1818. According to Pappe (1866) they were the first to do so. They described the fishes collected by the expedition in one of the volumes of Freycinet's Voyage autour du monde.... (1824).
The two served together again on the Astrolabe during 1826 to 1829, on a voyage around the world under the command of J. Dumont D'Urville. On this voyage they visited the Cape again and collected shells around Table Bay and the Cape Peninsula. The results of the expedition were described in Voyage de découvertes de l'Astrolabe, exécuté par ordre du Roi, pendant les années 1826-1829..., a multi-volume work published in Paris in 1830-1835. The zoological descriptions were written by Quoy and Gaimard, with Quoy also providing many of the illustrations, and included South African molluscs and only two species of fishes from the Cape. Meanwhile Gaimard, with Quoy as co-author, had published over 20 papers during 1824-1830, most of them in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, in which they described numerous zoological specimens collected by the expeditions of Freycinet and D'Urville. Two genera and several species were named after Quoy.
In 1824 Quoy was appointed as professor of anatomy at the School of Naval Medicine at Rochefort and subsequently became professor of medicine there from 1832 to 1835. He then worked at naval hospitals in Toulon (1835-1837) and Brest (1838-1848) before becoming inspector general of the Naval Bureau of Medicine and Surgery from 1848 until he retired in 1858. He was not married.
