Paul Georges Dieulafoy

Paul Georges Dieulafoy (1839 to 1911) was a French physician and surgeon born in Toulouse who trained in Paris and took his doctorate in 1869. He became Chief of Medicine at the Hotel-Dieu de Paris, taught pathology at the University of Paris and served as president of the French Academy of Medicine in 1910. He is best remembered for his clinical study of acute appendicitis, whose early signs he described in detail and for which he argued that surgery was the right treatment, and for the lesion that bears his name, a rare cause of gastric bleeding. He also improved a pump-like device for draining fluid from the chest, wrote a widely used Handbook of Internal Pathology, and published case reports from his private practice.