Background
Henri Coutard was born on April 27, 1876 in Marolles-les-Braults, Sarthe, France. He was the son of Louis Coutard and Mélanie Marie Joséphine (Ragot) Coutard, both from neighboring agricultural villages.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Henri Coutard was born on April 27, 1876 in Marolles-les-Braults, Sarthe, France. He was the son of Louis Coutard and Mélanie Marie Joséphine (Ragot) Coutard, both from neighboring agricultural villages.
After finishing high school in Caen, Coutard entered the medical school of the University of Paris, graduating in 1902.
Because he had developed pulmonary tuberculosis, he settled in a town in the Jura Mountains, where he practiced general medicine for several years and became an enthusiastic alpinist and skier. Having regained his health, he returned in 1912 to Paris and began research with radium at an experimental laboratory in Gif, a Paris suburb.
During World War I he served in a radiological ambulance unit on the Eastern Front.
In 1919 Coutard joined the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, as chief of the X-ray department. His work first attracted attention at the International Congress of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology in Paris in 1921, where, with Claude Regaud, he reported the cases of six patients with advanced carcinoma of the larynx, which had been controlled by means of X radiation. This marked the beginning of the acceptance of roentgen therapy as a primary method of treatment, rather than a method to be used only when no other choice remained.
Coutard did not believe in rigid rules and never published any rigid standards for administering radiation, which he adjusted according to each patient's reaction.
During a tour of the United States in 1935, Coutard took part in a round-table discussion of radiotherapy at a meeting of the American College of Surgeons in San Francisco and was invited to give the McArthur Lecture before the Institute of Medicine in Chicago.
Two years later he resigned his position in Paris and came to the United States. He worked for a short time with Robert A. Millikan at the California Institute of Technology, studying the use of high-voltage therapy, and then took up his post at the Chicago Tumor Institute, a short-lived institution founded by the histopathologist Max Cutler.
There for the next three years Coutard carried on research, worked on the use of brief, concentrated radiation in treating carcinoma of the larynx, and taught well-attended graduate courses. During this period, on the invitation of his patient Spencer Penrose (who had installed an X-ray machine in his own home), he spent some time in Colorado Springs, treating Penrose for throat cancer. After Penrose's death in 1939 and the establishment of the Penrose Cancer Hospital (later the Glockner-Penrose Hospital), Coutard moved in 1941 to Colorado Springs as its first radiotherapist, although he had never obtained a license to practice in this country. Meanwhile, however, a marked change had occurred in the direction of Coutard's professional interests, perhaps initiated by marital problems and a crisis in his personal life. After moving to Colorado he published no papers, seemed to have lost faith in accepted methods of radiation therapy, and devoted himself almost entirely to research that his medical associates regarded as strange. Those projects included X-ray filtration experiments that involved the use of a block of gold and slabs of aluminum, and the timing of irradiation to coincide with the height of the growth cycle of tumor cells. He postulated an extracellular antimitogenetic factor that confers radioresistance to neoplastic cells, contended that X rays could potentiate or even re-create the antimitogenetic factor, and insisted that patients having tumors with well-differentiated cells be treated with homeopathic doses of low-energy beta rays. Coutard's relations with the medical staff deteriorated, and he was finally asked to resign.
In 1949 Coutard returned to France and published a book presenting the results of his experimental work in Colorado Springs. A rambling mixture of clinical observations, working hypotheses, and fantastic assumptions, the book was ignored by the medical journals and led some colleagues to doubt Coutard's sanity. Nevertheless, he journeyed to Copenhagen and enlisted the support of a former pupil, the radiotherapist Jens Nielsen, in arranging for clinical tests of his hypotheses. On the return flight, Coutard suffered a cerebral hemorrhage; he died a few months later at the home of his sister in Le Mans.
Coutard was the first to publish on the diagnostic X-ray examination of the larynx; he constructed a photometric radiometer to improve the measurements of dosage; and he coined the term "radioepithelitis" for the reaction observed during irradiation of a mucosa. Perhaps his most important contribution was teaching a generation of radiologists to observe their patients carefully and to record painstakingly the clinical course of treatment. Coutard was a pioneer in the practical application of the time-dose relationship in radiotherapy, known as fractionation or the protracted fractional method the dividing of a given amount of radiation into several smaller doses administered at intervals of several days so as to allow recovery of the skin and mucosa which came to be known as "Coutard's method. "
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
On March 25, 1919, Coutard married Anne-Marie Adèle Rougier; they had no children. After her death in 1940, he married Suzanne Rosalie (Mathot) Jourgeon, the widow of a former patient. She died in France in 1949.
