The following brief biological sketch, extracted from Joubert's Popular Errors, is gleaned from P.- J. Amoreux and Louis Dulieu (see Bibliography for references).
Joubert was born on December 16, 1529 in the old province of Dauphiné in south central France. Although information on his early years is sparse, he was probably educated in his native city. At the age of twenty-one he went to Montpellier, a city renowned for the study of medicine. The student of Guillaume Rondelet, chancellor of the Faculté de Médecine, Joubert received his doctorate in 1558. He had acquired a reputation as a great pedagogue. We read, for example, that after Rondelet's death in 1556 -- only eight years after the beginning of his career -- he was made regent as a result of a petition signed by the Montpellier students. A short time later he was appointed chancellor of the Faculté. In this capacity he attracted the attention of Catherine de' Medici, who called him to be her personal physician. The high point in his professional life came when he was made one of the king's physicians, "médecin ordinaire du roi." He probably died in the small village of Lombers on October 21, 1582 not far from Montpellier, the city which had witnessed his rise to fame.
Busy as he was with the obligations of his practice, Joubert found time to compose several medical works. He wrote voluminously in Latin and in French, edited the important Grande Chirurgie of Guy de Chauliac, and published his Erreurs populaires to considerable scandal. In a work dedicated to Princess Marguerite de France he spoke openly of sexual matters and, what was worse, revealed in the vulgar tongue medical secrets previously shrouded in Latin. Three years before his death Joubert published his first written and most cherished work, the Traité du Ris, or Treatise on Laughter. A considerable portion of Joubert's work appeared in print just before 1580: the Grande Chirurgie, the Erreurs populaires, the Traitté des Arcbusades, and the Question vulgaire in 1578, and the Traité du Ris and the Pharmacopea in 1579.
Besides these works Joubert wrote the Medicinae practicae priores (in three books), the Isagoge therapeutices methodi, and the De affectibus internis partium thoracis, tractatus alter, all of which appeared in a single volume published in Lyons in 1577, and later in his Opera latina, which appeared in Lyons in 1582. An earlier edition of this work, published by J. Gregorii, is held in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux. Joubert's Opuscula, brief works published by his students, appeared in Lyons in 1571 as well as in his Opera latina; they contain his Annotationes in duos priores libros Galeni, de facultatibus naturalibus; Annotationes in Galeni librum, de differentiis morborum; Annotationes in Galeni librum, de differentiis symptomarum; De convulsionis essentia et causis; De cerebri affectibus; Ars componendi medicamenta; De syruporum conficiendi modo, et retendi ratione; Quaestiones medicae pro regia disputatae; and Joannis Hucheri pro philosophia libertate oratio. The second part of Joubert's Opera latina contains, with the exception of his tract on urine (De urinarum differentiis, causis et judiciis), letters and eulogies in which various medical questions are discussed, as well as health practices from antiquity. The last of Joubert's separate works to be published was his Traité des eaux, which appeared in Paris in 1603, more than twenty years after his death.