Gosset

Paris correspondents with nothing much to do sauntered around to the dingy Hospice de la Salpetriere last week and dug a choice little story out of Professor Jean Antonin Gosset, famed remover of the prostate glands of Georges Clemenceau (1912) and Raymond Poincare who left the hospital and strode spryly home last week (TIME, Dec. 23).

Salpetriere students were quick to boast of their beloved professor's exploits. In particular they told how, when his own appendix needed outing, he lay down on the operating table of his lecture room, called for students taking his course in advanced surgery, selected one by lot and bade him cut away.

Modest to the point of bashfulness, Professor Gosset explained to last week's newsmen that his appendix exploit was merely a classroom demonstration of two maxims he tries to impress upon all his students:

1) "Do unto others in a surgical sense what you would have others do unto you."

2) "If you are hesitant as to your duty. do to your patient what you would do to your father."

In 1915 at Chalons-sur-Marne, Professor Gosset improvised the first operating-room-ambulance, inaugurated the technique of sewing up soldiers on the spot almost as soon as they are blown open. In 1928 he was elected President of the French Congress of Surgeons. For 17 years he has refused, with a Frenchman's indomitable stubbornness, to be transferred from his beloved old hospital and lecture hall to more ornate quarters and a better paying professorship.

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