Although the English physician William Musgrave described the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis in his 1715 publication De Arthritide Symptomatica, credit is usually given to the twenty-year-old French physician Augustin Jacob Landré-Beauvais (1772–1840). Working at the Saltpêtrière in Paris, he described a disease somewhat different from gout or degenerative joint disease. It affected the poor more…