BOOK: "The life and Times of Guillaume Dupuytren" Prof P Wylock
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GUILLAUME DUPUYTREN 1777-1835 Paul Wylock
At the time of Dupuytren’s birth in 1777, Dupuytren was always closely involved in these historic events because he was in direct contact with the leading figures from the different periods, both privately and professionally. He played an important role in the organisation and reorganisation of medical surgical education. As the ‘head surgeon’ of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, the largest hospital in France, he treated not only a large and highly varied number of surgical patients, but also the victims of riots, insurrections, revolutions and wars, as well as victims of the cholera epidemic of 1832. His role in the development of modern surgery and surgical pathology was so overwhelming that the period during which he was ‘head surgeon’, is called the Dupuytren age in the history of surgery in The name Dupuytren has become immortal in medicine, not only in the contracture of the palm, which he described in extreme detail, but also in a specific fracture of the fibula. His name also survives in road names, in the ‘Musée Dupuytren’, the museum of pathological anatomy at the medical faculty in The Life and Times of Guillaume Dupuytren spans a distressing era of French history (1777-1835), in which the centre of medicine moved from |
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