Claude Pouteau

Claude Pouteau (1724 to 1775) was a French surgeon and inventor, born and deceased in Lyon. The son of a surgeon, he received his first medical education from his father and then studied in Paris under Jean-Louis Petit, Henri François Le Dran and Sauveur François Morand. After defending his thesis he returned to Lyon and was appointed junior surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu in 1744, later succeeding Pierre Grassot as major surgeon and, like him, promoting vaccination against smallpox. In 1753 he turned to private practice, where he was very successful, and in 1755 he was admitted to the Academy of Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Lyon. He made observations on cancer, rheumatism, tuberculosis and rickets, described a wide variety of forearm fractures, and devised a lithotomy procedure and a way of opening the eyelid from the inside to avoid visible scars. He also argued for hygiene measures in hospitals, such as washing the hands of surgeons and using single-use dressings, a century before Ignaz Semmelweis. He died of a skull fracture after a fall.