Charles Louis Stanislas Heurteloup

Charles Louis Stanislas Heurteloup was a French medical doctor, born in Paris on 16 February 1793, the son of the military physician Nicolas Heurteloup, and he died in 1864. He studied medicine in Paris and took his degree in 1823. He is credited with improving the instruments used in lithotripsy, the art of extracting a stone without incision, and among his inventions was a lithotrite called the percuteur courbe à marteau. In Paris he had as rivals the fellow lithotritists Jean Civiale and Jean-Jacques-Joseph Leroy d'Etiolles. In 1829 he traveled to England, where he performed the country's first lithotrity, and in 1831 he published Principles of lithotrity in London. He also invented an artificial leech, a device used to bleed sensitive regions around the eyes or the temples.