Alfred-Armand-Louis-Marie Velpeau

Alfred-Armand-Louis-Marie Velpeau (1795 to 1867) was a French anatomist and surgeon from Brèches in Indre-et-Loire. He trained under Pierre Bretonneau in Tours, took his doctorate in Paris in 1823 and worked there as a hospital surgeon, holding the chair of clinical surgery from the death of Alexis de Boyer in 1833 until his own death. In 1843 he succeeded Dominique Jean Larrey at the Académie des sciences. He wrote more than 340 titles on surgery, embryology, anatomy and obstetrics, among them a midwifery treatise and a work on diseases of the breast, and he is credited with the first accurate description of leukemia in 1827. The Velpeau bandage, which holds the arm against the chest, carries his name. He doubted that surgery could ever be painless and was astonished when ether and chloroform arrived in the 1840s.