Eugène-Louis Doyen

Eugène-Louis Doyen was a French surgeon born in Reims in 1859, the son of a mayor of that city. He studied medicine at the school of medicine in Reims and at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, trained as a student of Just Lucas-Championnière, and prepared his thesis on the cholera germ in Edmond Nocard's laboratory at the Pasteur Institute. He later opened a private medical institute in Paris that drew a wealthy clientele. A skilled and inventive operator, he introduced several surgical techniques and instruments, one of which, the Doyen abdominal retractor, still carries his name, and he was a pioneer of electrosurgery and electrocoagulation. He also sold a yeast extract called mycolysine as a treatment for infections. Doyen filmed his operations, including a craniectomy, a hysterectomy and the separation of the conjoined twins Radhika and Dudhika Nayak, and he experimented with colour and stereoscopic film; colleagues in France criticised this as damaging to the dignity of the profession. He died in 1916.