He was born in Geneva to Marie Castanet and Daniel de La Roche, and was the youngest of three children. His father was an Edinburgh-trained physician, botanist, and medical translator from Geneva, who was friends with Louis Odier, the Swiss physician, medical translator and publisher. After working in Geneva, the family moved to Paris where de La Roche senior was physician to the Duke of Orléans, and later at the fr:Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin health centre.[1][2][3]
Career
De La Roche studied at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris where, in 1806, he completed his medical thesis on the effects of strong heat on animal husbandry.[4] He became a physician at L'Hôpital Necker.[5]
He collected and studied fish on an expedition to the Spanish Balearic islands between October 1807 and May 1808; he observed and described new or little-known species from that location and made a study of the swim bladders of fish.[6][7][8][4]
De La Roche became infected with typhus bacteria and died in 1813, only just aged 32, during the same epidemic that his father also succumbed to. Both were interred in the family grave in the 25th division of Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.[4][18]
^Delaroche, F.E. (1809). "Suite du mémoire sur les espèces de poissons observées à Iviça [Ibiza]. Observations sur quelques-uns des poissons indiqués dans le précédent tableau et descriptions des espèces nouvelles ou peu connues". Annales du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. 13. Paris: 313–361.
^Delaroche, F.E. (1809). "Observations sur des poissons recueillis dans un voyage aux îles Baléares et Pythiuses". Annales du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. 13. Paris: 98–122.
^Delaroche, F.E. (1809). "Observations sur la vessie aérienne des poissons". Annales du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. 14. Paris: 184–217, 245–289.
^de La Roche, François-Étienne; Bérard, Jacques Etienne (1813). "Mémoire sur la détermination de la chaleur spécifique des différents gaz". Annales de chimie.
^Delaroche, François-Étienne (1808). "Eryngiorum nec non generis novi alepideae historia". Paris: Chez Deterville: 70. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)