Paul Reclus (surgeon)

Paul Reclus (1847 to 1914), christened Jean Jacques Paul, was a French physician who specialized in surgery. He was the son of the pastor Jacques Reclus and the brother of Élie, Élisée, Onésime and Armand Reclus. He is known for his research on local anesthetics, in particular cocaine, and his books on the subject include La cocaine en chirurgie of 1895 and L'anesthésie localisée par la cocaïne of 1903. His other published work includes a study of the histological lesions of testicular syphilis written in 1881 with Louis-Charles Malassez, the Cliniques chirurgicales de l'Hôtel-Dieu of 1888, the Cliniques chirurgicales de la Pitié of 1894, and an eight-volume Traité de chirurgie issued between 1890 and 1892 with Simon-Emmanuel Duplay. Reclus' disease, an abscess of the neck that causes a woody hardening of the subcutaneous connective tissue, is named after him; he described it in an article in the Revue de Chirurgie in 1896. He also helped write a study of his brothers, the Protestant-turned-anarchist Élie and Élisée Reclus.