Jean Itard

Biografi från Wikipedia

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard was a French physician born in Provence.

Without a university education and working at a bank, he was forced to enter the army during the French Revolution but presented himself as a physician at that time. After successfully working as an assistant physician at a military hospital in Soliers, in 1796 he was appointed deputy surgeon at Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, and in 1799 physician at the National Institution for Deaf Mutes.

In Paris, Itard was a student of distinguished physician René Laennec, inventor of the stethoscope. Laennec was a few years younger but had a formal education at the university at Nantes and later became a lecturer and professor of medicine at the Collège de France. Itard described pneumothorax in 1803; Laennec would provide a fuller description of the condition in 1819.

In 1821, Itard published a major work on otology, describing the results of his medical research based on over 170 detailed cases. He is credited with the invention of an Eustachian catheter that is referred to as "Itard's catheter". Numbness in the tympanic membrane during otosclerosis has the eponymous name of "Itard-Cholewa Symptom".