, principal surgeon to the Hotel-Diet) in Paris, and a great improver of
, principal surgeon to the
Hotel-Diet) in Paris, and a great improver of the art, was
born Feb. 6, 1744, at Magny Vernois, a village in the
province of Franche Cointc. He was educated among the
Jesuits, and intended by his father for the church; but
evincing a stronger inclination for the medical profession,
he was sent to Befort, where he spent three years in the
military hospital there. To his medical studies he added
that of the mathematics, in which he made great progress;
but fell into one of the many errors so common among
the physicians of that day, namely, a false application of
the rules of geometry to the laws of the animal œconomy.
He not only perused with avidity the treatise of Boreili,
“De IMotu Animaliuin,
” but translated the whole of it,
and added a commentary more abundant in calculation
than that of his author. In 1764, at the age of nineteen,
he came to Paris, where surgery at that time flourished
under Lafaye, Morand, AndouiHet, and Louis. Animated
by the fame they had acquired, and desirous to emulate
them, Desault pursued his anatomical studies with the
greatest ardour, and was continually employed in dissections, or in witnessing the operations performed in the
hospitals. In the winter of 1766, he commenced a course
of lectures on anatomy, and soon reckoned 300 pupils,
most of them older than himself, who were attracted by
the clearness of his demonstrations, the methodical arrangement of his descriptions, and, above all, by his indefatigable zeal as a teacher. After some opposition from
the jealousy of the other lecturers, whose schools became
deserted, he was admitted* in 1776 into the corporation of
surgeons, and allowed to pay the usual fees when convenient; a circumstance which, however honourable to their
liberality, shews that his celebrity had not yet been attended with much pecuniary advantage. After becoming
a simple member, and then a counsellor of the perpetual
committee of the academy of surgery, he was appointed
chief surgeon to the hospital of the college, and consulting
surgeon to that of St. Sulpice, neither of which added any
thing to his fortune, but increased his experience. In
1779 he invented the bandage now in use for fractures, by
means of which, the fragments being kept in a state of
perpetual contact, become consolidated, without the least
appearance of deformity; an almost inevitable consequence
of the former mode.