Background
He was born c. 1764 in the South of France at Pont-de-Cé, was the eldest son of Marie Anne Kenotaire and Jean Pierre Prevost, natives of the Eastern Department of Marbelleau.
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François Marie Prevost
Edit ProfileEducation
He graduated in medicine at Paris.
Career
After studies he settled in the "Isle et Cote Saint Dominique" (Haiti), where he served as health officer at Port de Paix.
In Louisiana he practised for nearly half a century. Only one American physician, so far as is known, had successfully performed Cesarean section before Prevost (Dr. Jessee Bennett of Rockingham County, on his own wife, January 14, 1794, saving both mother and child), and he had published no report of the case. In Prevost's experience the most common cause of dystocia apparently was rickets, with resulting pelvic deformity.
His first two operations, probably between 1822 and 1825, were performed upon the same woman, a slave, in two successive pregnancies complicated by rachitic pelvic deformity, and resulted in recovery for both mother and child. He made his third Cesarean section about 1825 on a slave woman, the property of a German blacksmith, Krolin, the child alone surviving. His fourth operation was performed in 1831 on a twenty-eight year old negress, Caroline Bellau or Bellak, the property of Madame Maurous. A laparotomy by left lateral incision saved both mother and child. Prevost named the girl, a mulatto, Cesarine, and she was freed upon his stipulation, married, and lived in New Orleans.
He never published a line to record or proclaim his achievements; he expected no material reward, and only made it a condition that if his patients should recover they should be freed from slavery. Prevost had apparently retired from practice when he died in Donaldsonville, at the age of seventy-eight.
Achievements
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Francois Marie Prevost's claim to distinction rests upon his daring and successful performance of the Cesarean section, he was one of the first surgeons, who made sucessfullu such type of operation. Prevost's courage and his success are amazing in view of the difficulties under which he labored. He saved seven out of eight lives by an operation which had been condemned in the greatest hospitals of the world - in Paris, London, Vienna - because it had proved almost invariably fatal even in the hands of the greatest masters.
Personality
He was not craving for fame or glory.
Connections
On December 13, 1799, he married Marie Thérèse, the widowed daughter of Marie Thérèse Giroud and Joseph Burruchon. Taking his bride to Louisiana, he settled in Donaldsonville, Ascension Parish, a government post surrounded by plantations on which lived a few white planters who controlled a large population of negro slaves.
After the death of his first wife, he married, May 29, 1838, Victorine Castellain, of Donaldsonville. He left a son, Jean Louis Prevost, living in Brittany, who inherited his estate. Of the fate of an adopted son, John Robertson, nothing is known.
