Noël Guéneau de Mussy

Noël-François-Odon Guéneau de Mussy was a French physician, born in Paris on 6 November 1813 and dead on 1 June 1885. He came from a family of learning: his father Philibert Guéneau de Mussy was a writer and his grandfather Jean Noël Hallé was a noted hygienist. He became an intern in the Paris hospitals in 1835, took his medical doctorate in 1837 and in 1842 was appointed a médecin des hôpitaux, serving at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine, the Hôpital de la Pitié and the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. He sat in the Académie Nationale de Médecine, and two of his assistants, the ophthalmologist Henri Parinaud and the pediatric surgeon Édouard Kirmisson, went on to careers of their own. His research touched whooping cough, inflammation of the tongue, exophthalmic goitre and glandular angina, and his chief written work was the four-volume Clinique médicale, issued between 1874 and 1885. His name survives in the Guéneau de Mussy point, a spot on the left edge of the sternum that becomes painful under pressure when diaphragmatic pleurisy is present.