Paul Barbette

Paul Barbette was a seventeenth-century Dutch physician and surgeon, born in Strasbourg on 5 February 1620 and buried in Amsterdam on 10 March 1665. He finished his medical studies at Leiden University in 1645 and afterwards practised both medicine and surgery in Amsterdam. He opposed bleeding in every case and relied chiefly on sudorifics, remedies meant to bring on sweating. He proposed the operation of gastrostomy for cases of intussusception of the bowels, introduced some improvements in surgical instruments, and is credited by the source with the first description of intussusception, for which it gives the year 1674. His many writings in Dutch and Latin were collected in the Opera omnia medica et chirurgica, printed in Amsterdam in 1672 in eight volumes, and were translated into Italian, German, French and English. The source judges that they hold little original matter but show wide learning, and that he was a high authority in his day.