Jaques-Louis Reverdin

Jaques-Louis Reverdin (1842 to 1929) was a Swiss surgeon from Cologny who studied at the University of Paris and became chief surgeon at the Cantonal Hospital of Geneva and a professor at the University of Geneva. In 1869 he performed the first fresh skin allograft, and the pinch graft, in which tiny pieces of healthy skin are seeded onto a wound, still carries his name, as does a surgical needle. In 1882, with his cousin and assistant Auguste Reverdin, he observed that myxedema follows as a delayed complication when the thyroid gland is surgically removed, and he reported this in a paper on twenty-two goitre operations presented to the Medical Society of Geneva. After retiring in 1910 he devoted himself to butterflies, and Reverdin's blue butterfly is named for him.