Auguste Nélaton

Auguste Nélaton (1807 to 1873) was a French physician and surgeon who worked in Paris. Born there on 17 June 1807, he began his medical studies in 1828 and took his doctorate in 1836 with a thesis on the effects of tuberculosis on bone. A few years later he became an agrégé at the Hôpital Saint-Louis after publishing a work on the treatment of breast tumors, and from 1851 to 1867 he was a full professor, leaving that post to serve as personal surgeon to Napoleon III. He is remembered for the porcelain-knobbed probe that bears his name, used to locate bullets and applied in 1862 to find the bullet in Giuseppe Garibaldi's ankle, and for the rubber catheter that spared patients the stiff instruments then in use. His work also covered plastic surgery, pelvic and abdominal surgery and lithotomy, and he revived the tying of both ends of a cut artery to control bleeding, a practice first promoted by Ambroise Paré in the sixteenth century. His students included the Puerto Rican independence leader and surgeon Ramón Emeterio Betances. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1867, made an imperial senator in 1868, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.