Louis Jacques Bégin

Louis Jacques Bégin (1793 to 1859) was a French military doctor, born on 2 November 1793 in Liège and dead on 13 April 1859. He began his medical studies in the military hospital at Metz and served as an assistant surgeon in the Napoleonic Wars, in the Russian and German campaigns. From 1815 he was associated with the civil hospital in Strasbourg and then with Val de Grace, took his doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in 1823, and in 1832 became a lecturer there in anatomy, physiology and surgery; his students included the obstetrician François Joseph Herrgott. He worked in Paris from 1835. Appointed surgeon-major in 1832, he joined the Conseil de santé des armées in 1842 and presided over it from 1850 to 1857, and in 1847 he was elected president of the Académie de Médecine. With Louis Joseph Sanson he published new editions of Sabatier's treatise on operative medicine, and he wrote on therapeutics, pathological physiology and the military health service of France. The army teaching hospital Bégin in Saint-Mandé is named in his honour.