Researching Jean Younger

Riolan is remembered for his traditional views towards medicine, and was a major proponent of the teachings of Galen. He held a differing viewpoint in regards to the theory of his contemporary, William Harvey (1578–1657) on the blood's circulatory system. Riolan calculated that blood traveled through the blood vessels to the body's extremities and returned to the heart only two or three times a day. He also postulated that blood often ebbed and flowed in the veins and that it was taken in as nourishment by different parts of the body. Riolan did not believe that the heart propelled the blood, instead he proposed that the blood kept the heart in motion, analogous to a stream moving the wheel of a water mill.

Riolan had other disagreements with Harvey, such as the role of the liver as a blood-manufacturing organ. Riolan was an opponent to the practice of vivisection, asserting that violent and painful deaths suffered by research animals, placed them in an unnatural condition that led to incorrect assumptions about the functionality of healthy animals.

Riolan attacked Thomas Bartholin on the question of the latter's discovery of the lymphatic system.

Riolan's best known written works are Anthropographia (1618), which is a treatise on human anatomy, and Opuscula anatomica (1649), in which he is critical of Harvey's views of the circulatory system. In his Anthropographia he also defined what traits a good anatomist had to have.

The eponymous "anastomosis of Riolan" is named after him, which is the mesenteric arterial connection between the superior and inferior mesenteric arteries. Marginal fibers of the palpebral part of the orbicularis oculi muscle are known as "Riolan's muscle" — also histologically referred to as the "Grey Line." The cremasteric muscle is also eponymously named after Riolan.

Jean was the younger brother of Louis Boivin. After their father died in 1762, Louis made [Jean] came to Paris the following year, and would not share with anyone the care of raising and teaching [Jean]". His teaching method was bizarre but fruitful – he locked his student up in a galetas with a copy of Homer, a dictionary and a grammar and would not let him out until he could explain an agreed number of verses from it in French and Latin.

In 1692, Jean Boivin became garde of the king's library, where he made an important discovery of an ancient 4th or 5th century biblical text in uncial script later that same year, included in a manuscript of the homilies of saint Ephrem the Syrian. He acquired a scholarly reputation by publishing in Latin texts by the major mathematicians of antiquity and he was made a professor at the Collège royal, where he held the ancient Greek chair from 1706 to 1726. He translated Nicephorus Gregoras and Pierre Pithou, as well as Aristophanes, Homer and Sophocles, and wrote his own Greek poetry. He was elected a member of the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1705, and of the Académie Française in 1721.

Jean Richardot the Younger was the eldest son of Jean Richardot, a close collaborator of the governor-general Alexander Farnese and one of the principal ministers and diplomats of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, and of Anne Courcol de Baillencourt. Educated by the Jesuits at their college in Trier, he studied law at the universities of Trier and Salamanca. Destined for an ecclesiastical career, his father secured him the appointment as prior of the Benedictine priory of Morteau at the age of 16. It was also thanks to his father's patronage that he entered the Privy Council, one of the three Collateral Councils advising the governors-general of the Spanish Netherlands in 1595.

On 15 May 1600, the Archdukes appointed Jean Richardot their first resident minister at the Papal Court. In the course of his diplomatic mission, Richardot alerted Archduke Albert to the talents of Peter Paul Rubens and Wenceslas Cobergher. Following the death of Cardinal Andrew of Austria in November 1600, Richardot obtained the Benedictine abbey of Lure. Three years later the Archdukes nominated him bishop of Arras. He was consecrated in Rome on 30 April 1603 and made his solemn entry in Arras in February 1604. Shortly before his father's death, he was named archbishop of Cambrai on 17 August 1609. He died there after a long illness in 1614.