Antoine Louis

Antoine Louis (1723 to 1792) was a French surgeon and physiologist. He was first trained in medicine by his father, a sergeant major at a local military hospital, and as a young man moved to Paris, where he served as gagnant-maîtrise at the Salpêtrière. In 1750 he was appointed professor of physiology, a post he held for forty years, and in 1764 he became lifetime secretary to the Académie Royale de Chirurgie. He is credited with designing a prototype of the guillotine, and for a time the device was called a louisette after him, although it was later named for the physician Joseph Ignace Guillotin, whose advocacy of more humane capital punishment prompted its design. Louis published many articles on surgery, several biographies of surgeons who died in his lifetime, and the surgical aphorisms of Herman Boerhaave. The angle of Louis is another name for the sternal angle.