René Leriche

Henri Marie René Leriche (1879 to 1955) was a French vascular surgeon and physiologist, born in Roanne into a family of surgeons and doctors from the Lyon region. He took his medical doctorate in Lyon in 1906 with a thesis on surgical resection for stomach cancer, working under Antonin Poncet, and he became friends with Alexis Carrel. He specialised in pain, vascular surgery and the sympathetic trunk, and after seeing the mutilated of the First World War he became one of the first surgeons to treat pain as a subject in its own right and to favour gentle surgery with as little trauma as possible. Two conditions carry his name, algoneurodystrophy and aortoiliac occlusive disease. His students included Michael E. DeBakey, João Cid dos Santos and René Fontaine.