Joseph-François Malgaigne

Joseph-François Malgaigne, who lived from 14 February 1806 to 17 October 1865, was a French surgeon and medical historian born in Charmes-sur-Moselle in the Vosges. He studied medicine in Paris and became a surgeon at Parisian hospitals including Saint-Louis, Charite and Beaujon, where he was a colleague of Auguste Nelaton. He was the father-in-law of the surgeon Leon Clement Le Fort and became a member of the Academie de Medecine in 1846. He is known for his work on bone fractures and dislocations, specializing in orthopedic surgery of the knee, hip and shoulder, and in 1834 he published an influential work on operative surgical technique that was later translated into several languages. With Germanicus Mirault he designed a flap transposition procedure to close cleft lips. He advocated statistical analysis in medicine and is remembered for his statistical hospital surveys in Paris, and as a historian he studied the works of Hippocrates and edited the writings of Ambroise Pare. In 1841 he founded the surgical journal Journal de chirurgie.