Docteur Auguste Nélaton
(1807-1873)

Doctor Auguste Nélaton was one of the greatest French surgeons of the nineteenth century.

Born in 1807, Nélaton made his medical studies in Paris, graduating in 1836 with a thesis on tubercular infections in bones. All his subsequent university career took place in Paris. In 1851 he became professor of clinical surgery with a thesis that attracted wide attention and was translated into German the following year. As a member of the surgical staff of the Hôpital de St Louis, he devised a number of original surgical procedures and operations and was the first to suggest the ligature of both ends of an artery in primary and secondary haemorrhaging. He was also responsible for important advances in plastic surgery, and in abdominal and pelvic surgery. The Nélaton probe, which he invented, was successfully used by him in 1862 to locate the bullet in Garibaldi’s ankle.

In 1863 he was elected a member of the Paris Academy of Medicine and in 1867 of the French Institute of Science. He became a Senator of the French Empire in 1868.

Doctor Auguste Nélaton died in Paris on 21 September 1873.