France
Alexis Carrel
1873–1944 Major, French Army Medical Corps; co-developer of the Carrel-Dakin wound treatment
Born in the Lyon area, Alexis Carrel studied medicine at Lyon, where he developed a technique for suturing small blood vessels. He continued this work in Chicago and from 1906 at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912. In the First World War he served as a major in the French Army Medical Corps. With the English chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin he developed the Carrel-Dakin method of treating wounds, which irrigated them with a chlorine-based antiseptic solution and came into wide use. His best-selling book Man, the Unknown (1935) advocated eugenics. He later headed a foundation created by the Vichy regime and, accused of collaboration after the Liberation, died on 5 November 1944 before any trial.