Jan F. Esser

Jan F. Esser, in full Johannes Fredericus Samuel Esser, was a Dutch plastic surgeon, born in Leiden on 13 October 1877 and died in Chicago on 9 August 1946. He pioneered innovative methods of reconstructive surgery on soldiers wounded in the First World War. He is thought to have coined the word stent in 1917, when he used a dental impression compound invented in 1856 by the English dentist Charles Stent to make a form for facial reconstruction; the term was later extended to mean any device that expands a constricted tube of body tissue. Outside medicine he won the Dutch chess championship in a play-off against Rudolf Loman in 1913 and kept a sizeable collection of modern Dutch art, with personal ties to artists such as Piet Mondrian, George Hendrik Breitner and Jan Sluijters.