Contribution of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital to French Anesthesiology

1147 December 2012 T HE Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, founded in 1612 as a home for the poor and then as a hospice, has been progressively transformed over the years to become a center of excellence in the field of health (fig. 1) The 2,000 conventional hospital beds have been decreased to allow the construction of modern technical units, which have allowed both the development of major surgery and the management of outpatient surgery patients. Today, the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital is one of Europe’s oldest, largest (1,500 beds, 47 operating rooms, and 140 surgical and multidisciplinary critical care unit beds, including the 80 surgical and multidisciplinary critical care unit beds managed by the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care) and best renowned hospitals with a long-standing affiliation with the University of Paris, now University Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6. The Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital’s reputation dates back to the middle of the 19th century with the discoveries of Charcot. In the second half of the 20th century, the hospital’s surgical activity, particularly major surgery and transplantations, developed with the support of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. It was at the PitiéSalpêtrière, that Christian Cabrol, in 1968, performed the first successful heart transplantation in Europe, allowing the development of very active research on the care of braindead organ donors in our department.1 Working in a hospital that is celebrating its 400th anniversary implies constantly projecting medical practice into the future. In France, the anesthesiology–critical care specialty, driven by the impetus provided by Pierre Viars, M.D. (Professor, University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France (1930–1998), head of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care from 1972 to 1995, has largely contributed to the modernization of both our specialty and, as a consequence, to surgical care. Professor Pierre Viars was the real founder of the PitiéSalpêtrière hospital Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, by forming a team that enabled him to ensure clinical care, teaching, and research in the fields of both anesthesiology and critical care, as clearly illustrated by the numerous articles published in this issue concerning studies performed in the department that he founded. It is relatively simple to describe the past and predict the future, but it is much more difficult to be clear-sighted in everyday practice. This particular quality enabled Pierre Viars to make French anesthesiology– critical care a full-fledged medical specialty. Observing that anesthesiology was not considered to be a real medical specialty, but rather a “necessary evil,” all his life’s work was devoted to recognition of our specialty by the hospital community, based on the principle that anesthesiology–critical care physicians play a central role in surgical practice, and are therefore essential. When recruiting physicians, he therefore required a high level of medical and scientific training, as he was convinced that only constant reference to medical progress would enable them to be recognized and considered by physicians of other specialties. He was the first to understand that basic and clinical research was essential for EDITORIAL VIEWS