Henri Marie Rene Leriche – a French surgeon and physiologist, member of the Paris Academy of Sciences
 (to the 140th of birthday)

Abstract

Rene Lerish was born in 1879, graduated from the Maristes School. In 1893 he received a bachelor's degree in rhetoric. In the years 1899-1900 Lerish served military service. In 1902, after graduating from the Faculty of Medicine in Lyon, he worked as an external student. In 1906, Lerish wrote a doctoral thesis on gastric resection for cancer. In the First World War, Lerish was at the front, where, among other things, he headed the school for the improvement of military field surgeons, wrote a number of works on the treatment of fractures, suggested organizing a center for vascular surgery. After the war, Leriche worked in Lyon until 1924, when he received the department of clinical surgery at the University of Strasbourg. In 1937, he took the place of professor at the College de France. Rene Leriche investigated the problem of pain, studied the sympathetic nervous system, including. Leriche developed access to the parathyroid glands, methods of resection of the stomach and treatment of trophic ulcers with varicose veins, periarterial sympathectomy (1913), operations for endarteritis obliterans and post-thrombophlebitic syndrome, described the syndrome of Leriche and proposed a method for its treatment. His work has also been devoted to problems of orthopedics, surgical endocrinology and anesthesiology. Leriche was the author of the concept, which called for restoring not so much the structure, but the function of the affected organ. Returning to Lyon in 1940, he resigned from the post of Minister of Health and until 1952 worked at the Center for Vascular Surgery in Lyon. He was the founder and first president of the European Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons. In 1955, Rene Lerish died. He published about 1,200 scientific papers, including 21 monographs. Leriche was a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1945), the National Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Surgery of France (1946), received the title of honorary doctor of thirty foreign universities. In 1958 in France a postage stamp was issued with his name and a portrait on it.