Alexis Carrel

In 1913, he married Anne-Marie-Laure Gourlez de La Motte. She was the widow of M. de La Meyrie and had a son. Carrel and Anne had no child of their own.

Once in 1914 during the ‘First World War’, his wife assisted him as a surgical nurse.

He met Trappist monk Alexis Presse in 1939 who eventually had great influence on Carrel for the rest of his life.

He was born on June 28, 1873, in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon in eastern France, in the Roman Catholic family of Alexis Carrel Billiard and Anne Marie Ricard as their eldest child among three. His father was a textile manufacturer and died when Alexis was just five. After his father’s death, he and his siblings were raised by his mother.

He attended a Jesuit day school and college near Lyons and showed great interest in biology. He used to dissect birds as a schoolboy. In 1889 he received his Bachelor of Letters from the ‘University of Lyons’.

After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from ‘University of Lyons’ in 1890, he further studied in the university as a student of medicine and earned his medical degree in 1900.

He remained attached with Lyons’ hospitals during 1893 to 1900, barring a year when he served the ‘Chasseurs Alpins’ of the French army as a surgeon. He was also attached with the lab of renowned anatomist J. L. Testut in 1898.

According to Carrel’s claim in 1902 at Lourdes he witnessed miraculous healing of Marie Bailly, who named him as the key witness of her cure. This event that transformed him from a sceptic to a believer in spiritual cures proved detrimental to his career and affected his reputation among his medical counterparts.

Unable to find a hospital job and sensing no future for him in academic medicine in France, he migrated to Montreal, Canada in 1903.

In 1904 he moved to Chicago in Illinois and began working at ‘Hull Laboratory’. This is where he worked on vascular suture and transplantation of blood vessels and organs in collaboration with American physiologist Charles Claude Guthrie.

In 1905 he was inducted by ‘University of Chicago’ in its ‘Department of Physiology’ where he worked under Professor G. N. Stewart.

In 1906 the newly established ‘Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research’ in New York, inducted him as an ‘Associate Member’ and later in 1912 he became a ‘Full Member’. He devoted rest of his career at this institute and conducted prominent research work there. In collaboration with the US surgeon and pathologist Montrose Thomas Burrows, he carried out significant investigations on ‘tissue culture’, a phrase coined by both.

His major contributions include his work on vascular suture and transplantation of blood vessels and organs including development of new methods to suture blood vessels; significant investigations on ‘tissue culture’, invention of first perfusion pump; and development of ‘Carrel–Dakin’ method for treating wounds.