Larrey, Baron Dominique Jean (1766-1842). Larrey began his career as a naval surgeon and joined the French army in 1793, rising to become Napoleon's chief surgeon. In a career which spanned 60 battles and saw him wounded three times, Larrey was enormously influential both as a surgeon and a medical administrator. He advocated primary amputation, and practised the debridement of necrotic tissue, subsequently leaving the wound open, a policy revived with success during the Falklands campaign of 1982. Unusually for his age, he insisted on hygiene, ordering his subordinates to change their clothing frequently and wash with vinegar water. He developed a mobile ambulance corps, using specially designed light ambulances manned by properly trained personnel, and allocated medical detachments, with ambulance units bringing wounded to advanced dressing stations, to each of the army's field divisions. Larrey was supremely practical: on one occasion he used the breastplates discarded by unhorsed cuirassiers to boil the flesh of their mounts and feed the wounded. At Eylau he operated for 24 hours in weather so cold that his assistants could not hold the instruments, and at Borodino he carried out 200 amputations on the day of battle alone. He was also a prolific author of memoirs and medical works.
— Richard Holmes
