An interesting history story about a French embroiderer who helped revolutionize surgery:
On June 25, 1894, the French President Marie François Sadi Carnot attended a banquet at the Chamber of Commerce in Lyon. [...] One man present, Sante Geronimo Caserio, [...] revealed a dagger, which he plunged deep into Carnot's back. [...]
The surgical trainee Alexis Carrel was, like his fellow countrymen, appalled by the assassination, but he directed his ire not towards things Italian, rather the impotence of his profession. Carrel believed that, if only Carnot's doctors had possessed the skill, they'd have been able to save the president's life.
[...] He soon found that, even with recent advances in surgery, the thread surgeons used was too thick for tiny blood vessels, which would easily tear. The needles were too bulky, too, [...] If he was going to attempt to sew vessels together, he would need better. With nothing very delicate available at surgical suppliers of the time, Carrel turned to Lyon's famous embroiderers. [...]
The woman he went to see was called Marie-Anne Leroudier, one of Lyon's finest embroiderers. Leroudier isn't always mentioned in Carrel's biographies. [...] But if you take the trouble to look up her work, it's unfathomably intricate. [...]
Fleur Oakes, formerly the Embroiderer in Residence at the vascular surgery department at St Mary's Hospital in London, explains what Leroudier would have been able to impart to Carrel—knowledge that he wouldn't have been able to pick up elsewhere. This ranged from what she called 'thread management' (making the thread go where you want it to go) to ways of working one-handed and ways of achieving the intricacy required to work on tiny structures like veins and arteries.
In 1902 he presented his technique at scientific meetings in Lyon and published a paper on his findings. Being able to sew blood vessels together in the way Carrel described would revolutionize trauma surgery. [...]
Carrel would later go on to modify the technique further and it became the basis for much of vascular surgery, including bypass surgery. [...]
Transplants existed for centuries before Carrel, of course, but it was the application of techniques from embroidery—and particularly the uncredited Marie-Anne Leroudier—that made the internal organs no longer off limits to aspiring transplant surgeons.
This story comes from the book SPARE PARTS by Paul Craddock.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AnonTechie on Sunday May 29 2022, @08:34PM
A interesting history story about which I didn't know before. There are many such stories where techniques used in a totally unrelated field, are not only applicable, but very useful in solving problems in another field. Many technological advances are a result of such interaction. Thanks for submitting this !
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by unauthorized on Sunday May 29 2022, @09:13PM (1 child)
What I find the most interesting about this article is that it demonstrates the value of developing forms of skilled labor that aren't necessarily "valuable" in themselves. Pursuits that one could deem "worthless" from an idealized purely utilitarian standpoint can have transferable subskills that contribute to the development of more apparently valuable pursuits in ways that are not always obvious. I'm not saying it would necessarily have been impossible to make the same advancements without Leroudier's work, but it's hard to argue that the inspiration and knowledge coming from her field didn't accelerate the advancements in medicine described in the article.
The narrow specialization which comes with industrialized societies has an obvious advantage in allowing high degrees of personal proficiency, but it also has the disadvantage of reducing diversity of talent in every single individual. One has to wonder how many opportunities are lost because the value of transferable skills in different pursuits are not readily apparent to the laymen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @10:48PM
What I like is that there is an "Embroiderer in Residence" at St. Mary’s Hospital.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @10:18PM (3 children)
On the one hand many lives were saved.
On the other hand, now I've got pictures of flowers and geese all over my liver.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @10:46PM
Could be worse [sciencealert.com], I suppose.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday May 30 2022, @01:00AM (1 child)
... of the Seamstresses Guild....
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2022, @11:41PM
She's the one with the needle, and she knows how to use it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @04:38PM (1 child)
This sounds like a feel-good story, but it isn't quite passing the smell test for me. Notably the line: "Most surgeons at the time learned to sew from their mothers, sisters and wives."
Why would a man learn to sew from a family member rather than another professional surgeon? Sewing bodies has overlap with sewing cloth, but it is different as well. I'm prepared to believe it, but I'd want to know more from a reputable source with more credibility than, "hey, this is a cool piece of trivia."
Moreover, the fact that the article itself says, "Leroudier isn’t always mentioned in Carrel’s biographies. Even those who do name her tend to move on to something else by the end of the paragraph, dismissing her as a ‘seamstress’ whom he happened to ‘see’ and ‘be inspired’ by." Why do we think there is more to the story than that, and why The Daily Beast has the true version of events.
The phrasing is very weasel-y, too. "Fleur Oakes ... explains what Leroudier would have been able to impart to Carrel..." rather than "Fleur Oakes ... explains what Leroudier taught Carrel..." (Being definitive, not speculative.)
I'm sure Marie-Anne Leroudier was an amazing embroiderer. I'm sure she taught Leroudier things. I'm not sure she revolutionized the field of surgery and "made modern organ transplantion possible."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 31 2022, @07:38PM
I think the answers to your questions are in the linked story. I can't give you an authoritative answer to your first question, but the story does mention that the primary treatment was to tie a suture to stop bleeding, and where there were attempts to reconnect things, the sewing was very crude and prone to rupture later. If the surgeons were sewing very crudely, and you learned the trade from them, you'd be sewing crudely as well. Not to mention that most of the sewing that regular people would have done would have been pretty crude, or at least simple, such has hems and seams that you didn't care what they looked like on the back side.
I can't answer your second question without reading the book (which is why The Daily Beast would have the story, because they are summarizing the new book), but I suppose it would depend upon when Carrel's biographies would have been written. If any were before, say, 1960, I'd warrant a guess that Leroudier's contributions would have been minimized because she was a woman. Apparently Carrel himself had pretty strong opinions on a woman's place in society, as expressed in a popular book he wrote (The Man The Unknown [archive.org]):
It might also be a circumstantial argument connecting the timing and number of visits to Leroudier to his 1902 paper describing his new tissue sewing technique. I tried finding a copy of his 1902 paper, but all I could find were citations to it. I thought it would be an interesting read to see if he mentions how he developed his technique, though if he did, I presume the book author would have called that out specifically.
For your last question, certainly the current Embroiderer in Residence would not have any direct knowledge from over 100 years ago, but she would easily be able to describe the kinds of skills that a skilled embroiderer would have that differs from ordinary sewing and stitching.