Léon Labbé

Léon Labbé (1832 to 1916) was a French surgeon who also served in politics. Born in the village of Le Merlerault in the department of Orne, he trained as a hospital intern in Paris from 1856 to 1860 and took his medical doctorate in 1861. He then worked as a surgeon at several Paris hospitals, among them the Hôpital Beaujon, where he was chief surgeon for many years, and in 1879 he became a member of the Académie de Médecine. In 1892 he was elected to the Senate for Orne, and in that office he put forward laws of interest to physicians, the best known being the Loi Labbé of 1914, which made anti-typhoid vaccination compulsory for French soldiers. The Labbé triangle, the area where the stomach normally touches the abdominal wall, carries his name as an eponym. He was the uncle of the physician Charles Labbé, who first described the inferior anastomotic vein.