Pourfour du petit biography

François Pourfour du Petit 1) was an.
François Pourfour du Petit (24 June 1664 – 18 June 1741) was a French anatomist, ophthalmologist and surgeon who conducted careful anatomical studies of the.
François Pourfour du Petit was a French anatomist, ophthalmologist and surgeon who conducted careful anatomical studies of the human eye.

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Pourfour du Petit syndrome (PdP) or oculosympathetic spasm consists of unilateral mydriasis, upper eyelid retraction and hyperhidrosis related to irritation and hyperstimulation of the oculosympathetic pathway in the neck. It is important to recognise PdP, as it has the same topographic and diagnostic value as its opposite clinical presentation, Horner’s syndrome, caused by a lesion resulting in a deficiency of this same pathway.

It was first reported by Italian physicist Serafino Biffi in 1846.1 Even then, he identified irritative stimulation of the sympathetic nerve fibres in the neck adjacent to the carotid wall as responsible for the syndrome. However, it owes its name to Francois Pourfour du Petit (1664–1741), a French military surgeon who studied the sympathetic pathway in the neck and its implications for the eye in the early 18th century.

Knowledge of PDP has a dual importance. On the one hand, it must be recognised in order to prevent the common error of mistaking the pathological finding for miosis and ptosis on the contralateral side, in the form of a fal

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Abstract

François Pourfour du Petit (1664-1741) was a Parisian experimental Neuroanatomist, and Ophthalmologist.

Based on his extensive experiences of brain and spinal injuries as a military doctor in the armies of Louis XIV he performed many animal experiments that demonstrated the anatomy and functional significance of the cervical sympathetic nerves, correcting previous errors of Thomas Willis and Raymond Vieussens.

He long predated the descriptions of Horner’s syndrome (1869) when he showed that interruption of sympathetic pathways inactivated both the dilator muscle and produces miosis, and the superior tarsal muscle, which produces ptosis and enophthalmos. This was later elaborated by Hare, Weir Mitchell and Claude Bernard.

The tetrad of ptosis, miosis, enophthalmos, and impaired facial sweating was described in 1869 by Johann Friedrich Horner (1831-1886) (Figure 1), Professor of Ophthalmology in Zurich:

Anna Brändli, aged 40, a healthy looking peasant woman…six weeks after her last confinement noticed a slight drooping of her right upper eyelid, …The pupil of
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François Pourfour du Petit
François Pourfour du Petit was the son of a merchant and lost his parents when he was still a child. He received his early classical education at the Collège de Beauvais and then travelled through Belgium and Germany to undertake private studies. He enrolled at the University of Montpellier in 1687 and received his medical degree from that university in 1690. It is not known how he supported himself before he graduated. It is said that he met a man named Blondin, a distinguished amateur, who gave Pourfour access to his library and encouraged him to get a medical education.
Following graduation, Pourfour du Petit continued his medical and scientific studies in Paris and completed his surgical training at the Charité hospital. While at Paris he attended the public lectures at the Jardin du Roi by Joseph-Guichard Duverney (1648-1730) in anatomy; Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) in botany; and Nicholas Lemery (1645-1715) in chemistry.
Between 1693 and 1713 he served for extended periods as a physician in the armies of Louis XIV. He joined the ar