The first work on aviation medicine, a pamphlet of 18pp. issued as a thesis for the medical degree, published one year after the first balloon ascent by Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier in 1783. Leulier Duché speculated on ways that ballooning might be used in medicine, quoting an anecdote privately communicated to him by Montgolfier describing the “high” experienced by the aeronauts on a particular ascent.