Paul Carnot

Paul Carnot (16 January 1869, in Limoges – 1 April 1957, in Paris) was a French physician.

Paul Carnot

He served as médecin des hôpitaux in Paris, becoming a professor of therapeutic medicine in 1918 to the Paris medical faculty. In 1922 he was elected as a member to the Académie de Médecine.^[1]

Career

In 1906 he coined the term hémopoïétine (hemopoietin) to define a humoral factor he believed was responsible for regulation of red blood cell production. This being based on experiments with laboratory rabbits that he conducted with his graduate student Clotilde-Camille DeFlandre.^[2] They noticed that an increase of reticulocytes in normal rabbits occurred following the injection of blood plasma taken from anemic donor rabbits who had earlier been subject to bloodletting.^[3] Findings from their research were published in a paper titled Sur l'activité hémopoïétique du sérum au cours de la régénération du sang (On the hemopoietic activity of serum during the regeneration of blood).^[4]

Carnot was the author of numerous treatises on a wide array of medical subjects. With Paul Brouardel (1837–1906), Augustin Nicolas Gilbert (1858–1927) and others, he published the multi-volume Nouveau traité de médecine et de thérapeutique. The following are a few of his better known writings:

• Les régénerations d'organes, 1899 (Regeneration of organs)
• Maladies microbiennes en général, 1905 (Microbial illnesses in general)
• Médications histopoiétiques et médications histolytiques, 1911 (Medications histopoietic and histolytic)
• Precis de therapeutique, 1925 (Summary of therapy)
• La clinique medicale de l'Hôtel-Dieu et l'oeuvre du Pr Gilbert 1927 (The Medical Clinic of the Hôtel-Dieu and the work of Professor Gilbert)

His great-grand-father was Lazare Carnot, a French general,^[5] his father, Marie Adolphe Carnot was an engineer, head of the French École des Mines de Paris.^[6]