Léon Dufourmentel

Léon Dufourmentel was a French surgeon who lived from 1884 to 1957 and specialized in maxillofacial surgery, work that led him toward reconstructive surgery. The source describes him as the son of a merchant, an intern of the hospitals of Paris and later a leader of the clinical faculty of medicine of Paris. He married into the Paris anatomical tradition as the son-in-law of the anatomist Pierre Sebileau, and his son Claude became a plastic surgeon. During the First World War he was responsible for the care of the gueules cassées, the soldiers with broken faces, and this experience led to the creation of maxillofacial surgery units. For repairing facial wounds he described a pedicled vascularized flap from the temporal scalp, popularly called the Dufourmentel flap, which carried tissue to the chin area and proved more reliable than a free skin graft. He also proposed using prosthetic inclusions before 1930, with implants then made mostly of ivory or rubber for the nose. His published works include a 1918 text on emergency surgery of wounds of the face and neck, a 1939 book on reparative and corrective surgery and a 1946 essay on constructive surgery.