Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon, biologist and professor.
Background
Alexis Carrel was born on June 28, 1873 in Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon, France, the son of Alexis and Anne (Ricard) Carrel.
He was the oldest of three children, two boys and a girl, in a Roman Catholic family. His mother, Anne-Marie Ricard, was the daughter of a linen merchant. His father, Alexis Carrel Billiard, was a textile manufacturer. Carrel dropped his baptismal names, Marie Joseph Auguste, and became known as Alexis Carrel upon his father’s death when the boy was five years old.
Education
He attended a Jesuit day school and college near Lyons and showed great interest in biology. He used to dissect birds as a schoolboy. In 1889 he received his Bachelor of Letters from the ‘University of Lyons’.
After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from ‘University of Lyons’ in 1890, he further studied in the university as a student of medicine and earned his medical degree in 1900.
He received honorary doctorates from several universities including New York, California, Columbia, ‘Brown University’, ‘Princeton University’ and ‘Queen's University of Belfast’.
He taught anatomy at the University of Lyons from 1900 to 1902. Carrel began to experiment with various methods of suturing blood vessels in 1902, but his work was virtually ignored by authorities at the university. In 1904 he emigrated to Canada to raise cattle. However, this plan did not materialize, and he accepted a position at the Hull Physiological Laboratory of the University of Chicago. In 1906 he was invited to join the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City.
At the institute Carrel investigated the causes of complications in suturing blood vessels and methods of avoiding them. He developed the Carrel suture for stitching blood vessels together end to end. He later used his suture method to transplant blood vessels and even entire organs.
In 1914, Carrel returned to France to serve in the French army medical corps. He used his techniques of vascular surgery and markedly reduced the number of limb amputations. He and H. D. Dakin devised a method for irrigating wounds with a buffered sodium hypochlorite solution, reducing the incidence of gangrene. Carrel returned to the Rockefeller Institute in 1917 to establish a hospital, and then returned to France to continue his service until the end of World War I. His book Treatment of Infected Wounds (1917), written in collaboration with Georges Dehelly, describes his battlefield experiences.
Carrel returned to the Rockefeller Institute in 1919. There he investigated methods of tissue culture and succeeded in cultivating chicken-heart and other tissues. From 1930 to 1935 he worked with Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh; they perfected the first mechanical heart, a pumping device to supply a continuous circulation to organs to keep them alive outside the body. They published their historic paper, The Culture of Organs, in 1938.
Carrel returned to France in 1939 to join the French ministry for public health. After the fall of France in 1940, the German-dominated Vichy government appointed him director of the Foundation for the Study of Human Relations, to promote the mental and physical reconstruction of mankind in accordance with authoritarian ideas. It was based on a system of rule by intellect similar to that outlined in his book Man, the Unknown (1935), in which he had described a system of world government to whose "thinking center" politicians would go for advice. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Carrel was dismissed from his post and charged with German collaboration.
According to Carrel’s claim in 1902 at Lourdes he witnessed miraculous healing of Marie Bailly, who named him as the key witness of her cure. This event that transformed him from a sceptic to a believer in spiritual cures proved detrimental to his career and affected his reputation among his medical counterparts.
While on his death bed, Carrel called for Presse to conduct the Catholic Sacraments.
Politics
He faced media attacks towards the end of his life over his alleged involvement with the Nazis.
Views
Quotations:
"Men grow when inspired by a high purpose, when contemplating vast horizons. The sacrifice of oneself is not very difficult for one burning with the passion for a great adventure. "
"The quality of life is more important than life itself. "
"Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor. "
"Prayer is the most powerful form of energy one can generate. .. .It supplies us with a flow of sustaining power in our daily lives. "
Membership
His growing reputation for surgical skill, bold experimentation, and technical originality won him in 1906 appointment as Member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York.
He was twice elected honorary member of ‘Academy of Sciences of the USSR’ in 1924 and 1927. He remained member of many learned societies of several countries including France, the US, Germany, Russia, Spain and Italy.
Interests
He was making annual pilgrimages to Lourdes, France and conducting research into such supernatural phenomena as miracles.
Connections
In 1913, he married Anne-Marie-Laure Gourlez de La Motte. She was the widow of M. de La Meyrie and had a son. Carrel and Anne had no child of their own.
Once in 1914 during the ‘First World War’, his wife assisted him as a surgical nurse.