Jacques Antoine Rabaut-Pommier

Jacques Antoine Rabaut known as Rabaut-Pommier, (born Nîmes 28 October 1744, died Paris 16 March 1820), was a politician of the French revolutionary era. He was a member of the National Convention (1792–95) and of the Council of Ancients (1795-1801). In 1816 he was exiled for regicide under the Bourbon Restoration, though he later benefited from an amnesty. Deeply committed to medicine, he was an ardent advocate of vaccination.

He was the son of Paul Rabaut, a pastor from the Cévennes and of Madeleine Gaidan. His brothers were Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, a more famous politician, guillotined in Paris on 5 December 1793, and Pierre-Antoine Rabaut-Dupuis, also politically active. He spent his childhood in the insecurity and anxiety which was the norm for families of pastors during the period when protestantism was proscribed in France (known in French as 'the desert'). Like his brother Jean-Paul he was sent to the Lausanne seminary (1763–65) to study theology. He was ordained as a pastor and took up posts first at Marseilles in 1770 and later at Montpellier until 1792.

In 1782, at Montpellier, he founded a new hospital with a group of friends. Throughout his years in the south of France he devoted himself to medical and scientific studies. During the campaign against smallpox, he defended the superiority of vaccination over variolation from 1780 onwards. He also noted the relationship between smallpox and cowpox:

"About 1780 he had observed in the environs of Montpellier the fact that smallpox, sheep scabs, and cow blotches were regarded as identical diseases known by the name of pox. He noticed that the affection was least serious in cows and that when, by chance, the peasants had contracted it in milking the animals, they could go through the country, protected from smallpox by this alone. So he concluded this procedure to be as certain as 'inoculation' for smallpox and less dangerous."

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