Jean Baseilhac

Jean Baseilhac (1703 to 8 July 1781), known in religious life as Brother Come or Cosme, was a French surgeon and lithotomist. Born near Tarbes into a family of surgeons, he moved to Paris in 1726 and was attached to the Hotel-Dieu, where he had already earned a considerable reputation when he took the habit with the Feuillants in 1729 and received the name Brother Jean de Saint-Come, after the patron saint of surgeons. He founded a hospice for the poor in Paris at his own expense and practised there in person. He invented several surgical instruments, notably a lithotome intended to reduce the dangers of earlier methods of removing bladder stones, and argued over the hidden lithotome with the surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat. On 1 July 1750 he performed his first cataract extraction, in the same days that Natale Pallucci and Jacques Daviel began experimenting with the operation, which opened a new era in ophthalmology. He wrote a method of extracting the stone from the bladder above the pubis, published in 1779, and Diderot mentions Brother Cosme in Jacques le fataliste.