French Inventions - Medicine

Medicine

• Ligature of arteries in 1565 by Ambroise Paré.
• Blood transfusion by Jean-Baptiste Denys on June 15, 1667. and first modern transfusion by Émile Jeanbrau on October 16, 1914 (after the first non-direct transfusion performed on March 27, 1914 by the Belgian doctor Albert Hustin).
• Modern dentistry by Pierre Fauchard (father of modern dentistry, early eighteenth century).
• Modern Cataract surgery by Jacques Daviel in 1748 (even if early cataract surgery already existed in the antiquity).
• The first lifesize obstetrical mannequin, for teaching, by Angelique du Coudray in the 1750s.
• Stethoscope in 1816 by René Laennec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris.
• Medical Quinine in 1820 by Joseph Bienaimé Caventou.
• Codeine first isolated in 1832 by Pierre Robiquet.
• Aspirin in 1853 by Charles Frédéric Gerhardt.
• Hypodermic needle in 1853 by Charles Pravaz.
• Blind experiment by Claude Bernard (nineteenth century).
• Discovery of Plasmodium and its role in malaria by Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran on November 6, 1880.
• Incubator or Neonatal intensive care unit in 1881 by Étienne Stéphane Tarnier.. His student, Pierre-Constant Budin, followed in Tarnier’s footsteps, creating perinatology in the late 1890s.
• Rabies vaccine by Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux in 1885.
• Antibiotics by Louis Pasteur and Jean Paul Vuillemin (natural antibiosis, the modern artificial antibiotics will be developed by the British Alexander Fleming).
• Mantoux test by Charles Mantoux in 1907.
• Tuberculosis vaccine by Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin in 1921 (BCG).
• Antipsychotics in 1952 by Henri Laborit (chlorpromazine).
• Discovery of the cause of Down syndrome (chromosome 21 trisomy) by Jérôme Lejeune in 1958-1959 (syndrome first described by Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, Édouard Séguin and John Langdon Down)
• First bone marrow transplant by Georges Mathé, a French oncologist, in 1959 on five Yugoslavian nuclear workers whose own marrow had been damaged by irradiation caused by a Criticality accident at the Vinča Nuclear Institute.
• Insulin pump in 1981 by Jacques Mirouze (first implantation) in Montpellier.
• Discovery of human immunodeficiency virus by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier (1983).
• Mifepristone, the abortion pill, by Étienne-Émile Baulieu in 1988.
• Hand transplantation on September 23, 1998 in Lyon by a team assembled from different countries around the world including Jean-Michel Dubernard who, shortly thereafter, performed the first successful double hand transplant.
• Telesurgery by Jacques Marescaux and his team on 7 September 2001 across the Atlantic Ocean (New-York-Strasbourg, Lindbergh Operation).
• Face transplant on November 27, 2005 by Dr Bernard Devauchelle.