The story of my professional life, after my years as a student, is one marked with impromptu and sometimes traumatising events. These events rerouted me and set me on a path of action for which nothing could help me prepare. Albeit I was supposed to go into Obstetrics and live in Brittany, I was suddenly sent to Berck in Northern France to become an orthopedic surgeon.
I ended up staying there thirty years.
Living among the sick, being children or adolescents more often than not; sharing their worries, their fears and also their hopes, I became passionate about the surgical treatment of spinal column deformations. Another destiny was waiting for me at the age of 50.
For health reasons, i had to stop all professional activity for good and was placed in a state of permanent disability. Torn henceforth from what had been at the center of my day-to-day life, I had a hard time during this period of inaction and complete isolation.
As I was alone and without occupation—as well as having neither the qualification, nor scientific or researcher background, nor the financial means to launch myself into a productive research program, I had however acquired a certain concrete grassroots experience - I took back to work in a modest brick workshop added to my house in Brittany.
The purpose of my project was to study the possibility of bettering the surgical treatment of spinal deviations. This research was to last three years and ended up precursing the creation of a new implantable metal device. This device allows on-site improvement, correcting the spinal column deviation and consolidating the upright segment. Thanks to the extra-strong stability of the setting, the device allows the patient to be set upright on his or her feet without the use of plasters and corsets, hitherto compulsory for ten to twelve months after operation.
Introduced in 1983 and developed in collaboration with Professor Jean Dubousset and Docteur Michel Guillaumat, the concept and technique of this new device was quickly adopted by spinal surgeons throughout the globe. Today, several hundreds of thousands of patients of all ages and with differing prognoses have undergone operation with this device or its derivatives. For fifteen years, this innovation laid down the path toward repeat progressions made within spinal surgery. However, at the dawn of the third millennium, so much still remains to be done…
My hope is that the means at my disposal today serve to carry on the research that benefits a pathology that gave me my professional mission. It is in this spirit that, at the end of my professional life, I decided to create on both sides of the Atlantic a “Foundation for the Research on Spinal Pathology.”
I have met numerous doctors, surgeons and researchers spread out across the globe who invest their greater human and scientific skills, selflessly, throughout the research process in order to improve the quality of their client treatment programs. Their research projects do not always get the chance to receive official help from big health organizations or from the industrial companies that support such projects that are susceptible to economic repercussions. To that end, projects that are certainly valid fall under risk of not being completed for lack of means.
I entrust to my most distinguished colleagues and friends, reunited at the heart of the Scientific Board, the task of choosing and maintaining the most promising research programs and then following up on them and promoting them as well. I express my respect and my gratitude to them. I dedicate this Foundation to my patients of yesterday.
May these endeavors benefit, today and tomorrow, the patients of my colleagues in medicine and spinal surgery, near and far. I thank the chancellor of the Institut de France and the representatives of the five Societies for having agreed to shelter this Foundation under the infamous and prestigious aegis of the Institut de France.
Paris, January 23rd 1999