The scientific legacy and reflections on the surgery of the prominent French Clinician Professor Rene Lerishe (to the 140th anniversary of his birth)

Abstract

The scientific work of the outstanding French surgeon Rene Leriche is analyzed. Little-known facts from his life are noted. Lerish has published more than 1,200 scientific papers, including 21 monographs. Most of his works are devoted to problems of general and private clinical physiology and served as the basis for the establishment and development of the physiological direction in surgery. He investigated the problem of pain, in particular pain syndrome resulting from injuries; studied the possibilities of using surgical techniques for pathogenetic treatment. He was one of the first to propose the use of surgical interventions on the autonomic nervous system for the treatment of mainly peripheral vascular diseases. R. Lerish believed that the disease is not a distortion of normal, but the emergence of new physiological relationships. R. Lerish developed a technique for blockades and surgical interventions in the sympathetic department of the autonomic nervous system, including periarterial sympathectomy. He described the clinic in detail and proposed a method for surgical treatment of chronic occlusion of the terminal abdominal aorta (Lerish syndrome). R. Lerish attached great importance to the individual characteristics of a healthy person and indicated that doctors know little about a person during his illness. He was also worried by the fact that doctors know little why the disease takes one form or another, why the infection is virulent in one and benign in the other, while the contagiousness is the same. Lerish put forward in medicine the concept of individual pathology. He pointed out that the form of the disease depends on the organic personality of the person and does not depend on the type of infection. Referring to his impressions, Lerish said that he tried to search on this path, but found nothing but banality. For his work on the treatment of infected wounds, R. Lerish was awarded the Lister Medal (1939). He was the founder and first president of the European Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons; He was an honorary doctor of 30 foreign universities, an honorary member of several foreign academies and societies, including the All-Union Society of Surgeons of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.