Lucien Baudens

Lucien Jean-Baptiste Baudens ( – ) was a French military surgeon.

Biography

He was born in Aire-sur-la-Lys in the northern France from Jean-Louis Baudens, sheet merchant, and Marie-Adélaïde Baelen at the end of the Consulate and one month before the First Empire of Napoleon .

After studying medicine at the French Defence Health service of the University of Strasbourg, then in Paris (Val-de-Grâce military hospital), he was granted his M.D. in 1829. He participated to the French conquest of Algeria from the invasion of Algiers in 1830, then of Constantine, Médéa, Mascara, Tlemcen, Milianah with the general Pierre Berthezène. He served in the African Army for ten years and was commended eight times in the army corps order. He was made Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1831 and Officer in 1835.

In 1832, he had the French military hospital moved from Turkish Caratine barracks to the Hussein Dey's country house, and transformed it in military training hospital then in military medicine school. In 1836, the hospital closed and Baudens left the country. He was appointed professor in Lille then in Val-de-Grâce military hospital. In 1852, he was appointed Physician General Inspector.

As early as 1837, he insisted on the double experience necessary for a military surgeon: at the same time on the battlefield then in hospital. He was a defender of early amputations, accomplished with a true parage of regularization, the most distal possible to keep length and flaps suffisant for future equipment. It is a current recommendation for the realization of amputations in war traumatology and which is necessary for a functional equipment.

In 1853, in the French Academy of Sciences, he laid out the basic principles and rules of conduct that ensure good use of chloroform and considered this drug as the most effective and successful in military surgery.

He was sent on mission as expert during the Crimean War in 1855 by Marshal Vaillant. His mission was to inspect Army medical services and to report on the condition of military hospitals and ambulances. On site, he helped wounded and ill soldiers by taking forward measures against Service Corps and separated wounded and soldiers suffering from typhus. He was impressed by the work of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul, of the Russian Sisters of the Exaltation of the Cross and specially of Florence Nightingale.

He reported that chloroform had been successfully used in more than 25,000 wounded (over 8% of the total force).

Himself fell ill with typhus and back in Paris, he died on 27 December 1857, aged 53.

Works

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Honours

Commander of Legion of Honour (August 11, 1855). Great Officer of Order of the Medjidie. Member of the Defence Health Council. The Bourges military hospital, closed in 1997, was named after him.