Henri Chaput

Victor Alexandre Henri Chaput was a French surgeon born at Tonnerre on 17 November 1857, who specialized in surgery of the intestine. He studied medicine in Paris and took his doctorate in 1885, then became a hospital surgeon in 1888 and operated at several Paris hospitals, among them Broussais, Boucicaut and Lariboisiere. He stood at the front of surgical asepsis in his day and argued for sterile rubber gloves during operations. He also preferred spinal anaesthesia with stovaine to general anaesthesia for most operations. His name survives in two medical terms: Chaput's method, the surgical implantation of the ureter into the intestine, and the Tillaux-Chaput fracture, a fracture of the posterolateral tibial epiphysis that he described after Paul Jules Tillaux had described a similar fracture of the anterolateral tibia. He wrote on kneecap fractures, on operations of the intestine, stomach and bile ducts, and on surgical asepsis and antisepsis, and in 1898 he edited the collected works of Octave Terrillon. He died in 1919.