Philibert Joseph Roux

Philibert Joseph Roux was a French surgeon, born at Auxerre on 26 April 1780 and dead on 24 March 1854. He trained as a military surgeon and later moved to Paris, where he became a student and friend of the anatomist Xavier Bichat. In 1806 he became a surgeon at the Hôpital Beaujon, in 1810 he was assigned to the Hôpital de la Charité, and in 1835 he succeeded Guillaume Dupuytren as chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. He is remembered for pioneer work in plastic surgery: in 1819 he performed one of the earliest staphylorrhaphies, a surgical repair of a cleft palate, and in 1832 he is credited as the first surgeon to suture a ruptured female perineum. His writings include a textbook of operative medicine published in 1813 and a memoir on suturing the soft palate from 1825. A collection of his papers is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.