French naturalist who was a leading advocate of the idea of the spontaneous generation of life from nonliving matter.

Pouchet was director of the Rouen Museum of Natural History and the Rouen Jardin des Plantes (1828) and later a professor at the School of Medicine at Rouen (1838). In his major work, Hétérogénie (1859), he detailed the conditions under which living organisms supposedly were produced by chemical processes such as fermentation and putrefaction. His supporters were primarily among those whose religious or philosophical beliefs required the concept of spontaneous generation. Pouchet's theory was discredited when Louis Pasteur (Pasteur, Louis) proved the existence of microorganisms in the air. Today Pouchet's elaborate arguments are mere curiosities.