March 13

Charles Bonnet, the son of French expatriates, was born in Geneva, Switzerland on the 13th in 1720. As an adult, he chose to make the practice of law his profession. He possessed a roving eye however, and dabbled in the murky worlds of philosophy and the natural sciences. His work with the law was passable but largely unremarkable. In the natural sciences however, he managed to make a bit of a splash. A portion of Bonnet’s work in that field resulted in his having a syndrome named after him. The Charles Bonnet Syndrome, is a condition in which vivid, complex visual hallucinations occur in apparently normal people. I was somewhat surprised to learn that because I had always thought that the condition described was in fact the Owsley Stanley Syndrome.