From Victor Pauchet to Gaston Labat: The Transformation of Regional Anesthesia from a Surgeon???s Practice to the Physician Anesthesiologist

Abstract

L ouis Gaston Labat was a pioneer in the world of regional anesthesia. In the early 20th century, he brought to the United States knowledge he had acquired from his mentor, the French surgery professor Victor Pauchet. Labat was one of the founders of the “original” American Society of Regional Anesthesia (1) and the author of Regional Anesthesia: Its Technic and Clinical Application (2), which was considered the definitive textbook on regional anesthesia for at least 30 yr after its publication. The text was one of the first English-language anesthesia books devoted to the practice of regional anesthesia and one of the most popular in the United States at the time. Labat’s book was noted to have a remarkable similarity (3) to Pauchet’s book L’Anesthesie Regionale (4). Yet, no clear comparison of Pauchet and Labat’s work, including both text and illustrations, has been done. Did Labat simply copy Pauchet’s work? Was Labat’s work original and simply an outgrowth of Pauchet’s? Was there some middle ground, where copied elements of Pauchet are noticeable, yet a new and distinctive set of ideas, Labat’s alone, emerged from the pages of Regional Anesthesia?