Louis Ombrédanne

Louis Ombrédanne (1871 to 1956) was a French surgeon, born in Paris, who worked in both paediatric and plastic surgery. His father, Emile Ombrédanne, was a general practitioner. He became a surgeon to the Parisian hospitals in 1902 and a professor of surgery in 1907, and from 1921 to 1940 he headed paediatric surgery at the Hôpital Necker. His research centred on inventing new operative methods. In 1906 he was the first to describe using the pectoralis minor muscle to rebuild the breast after a mastectomy, and he introduced the transscrotal approach for the surgical repair of an undescended testis. After two fatal anaesthetic accidents in 1907 he devised a prototype inhaler as a safer way to give ether: a tin reservoir lined with felt to absorb the liquid, a graduated air inlet and a chamber holding a reserve of breathed air. It was tried on more than 300 patients and refined in later versions. In 1929 he gave an early account of what is now called malignant hyperthermia, describing pallor with high temperature in newborns under anaesthesia, and the disorder was long known as Ombrédanne syndrome.