Eugen Aburel

Eugen Bogdan Aburel (January 23, 1899 16 December 1975) was a Romanian surgeon and obstetrician. He introduced innovative techniques in gynecologic surgery.

Early life and education He was born Galați; his father came from a family of Armenians of Moldavia, while his mother was a descendant of the family of metropolitan . He started his secondary studies at the Gheorghe Roșca Codreanu High School in Bârlad and finished them in 1917 at the Vasile Alecsandri High School in Galați. After attending the artillery military school in Botoșani and graduating with the rank of second lieutenant, he studied at the Faculty of Medicine of Iași, obtaining his doctor in medicine degree in 1923 with thesis Contribuțiuni la tratamentul infecției puerperale. In his work, which he presented at a meeting in Paris, he described using a continuous epidural catheter for pain relief during childbirth. He was the first to recognize and write about the afferent nerve supply to the uterus; he concluded that the uterus had a "double sensory innervation" with sympathetic fibers entering the spinal cord at T11L2 and cerebrospinal fibers entering at S2S4. His technique was to administer a sacral epidural anesthetic of dibucaine with adrenaline in the first stage of labor; if additional medication was needed, it would be administered through a needle catheter placed into the caudal canal during the second stage of labor or into the lumbar aortic plexus during the first. In 1934, Aburel developed the method of instillation abortion. In the 1950s, he was the first to describe radical trachelectomy as treatment for early-stage cervical cancers; this technique was all but forgotten until the 1990s, when it was revitalized, providing fertility-sparing options for patients with such cancers.

From 1952 to 1969, he was director of the ; during that time, he also practiced at the maternity wards of the , , and hospitals. He died in Bucharest in 1975, at age 76.

Works Contribuție la tratamentul infecției puerperale (1923) Abces apendicular la stînga (1927)

Recherches sur les glandes endocrines pendent la vie intrautérine chez l'homme (collaborator, 1939)