Léon Clément Le Fort

Léon Clément Le Fort was a French surgeon, born in Lille in 1829 and died in 1893. He trained in Paris under Joseph-François Malgaigne and Stanislas Laugier, took his doctorate in 1858, and later became Malgaigne's son-in-law. He volunteered in the Second Italian War of Independence, became prosector at the Paris medical faculty in 1861, and held posts at several Paris hospitals before taking a chair of surgery in 1873 and a surgical post at the Hôtel-Dieu. During the Franco-Prussian War he headed a field hospital at Metz. His work ranged over orthopaedic surgery, gynaecology, pregnancy and military surgery, and he is remembered above all for his operation for uterine prolapse. Several procedures and instruments still carry his name, among them Le Fort's operation, Le Fort's amputation of the foot, a fracture of the ankle and a curved sound for urethral strictures. He argued for asepsis in hospitals before bacteriology was established, and was president of the Académie Nationale de Médecine in the year he died.