Pierre-Carl-Édouard Potain

Born July 19, 1825, in Paris; died there Jan. 5, 1901. French physician. Doctor of medicine (1853). Member of the National Academy of Medicine (1882) and of the Academy of Sciences (1893).

Potain graduated from the medical faculty in Paris in 1848. In 1876 he became a professor of pathology and internal medicine and later of medical clinical practice at the Necker hospital; beginning in 1886 he was a clinician at the Charité hospital. His chief works dealt with methods of studying the organs of the thorax and with the symptomatology of heart diseases. Potain helped introduce the use of X-ray examination, sphygmography, and the measurement of arterial pressure into clinical cardiology. He studied the origin of gallop rhythm and of functional heart sounds and evaluated them clinically. He also invented a blood-cell counter and an apparatus for aspirating exudate from the pleura (Potain’s apparatus).