Henri Coutard

Henri Coutard
Coutard in 1937
Born	(1876-08-27)27 August 1876 Marolles-les-Braults, Sarthe, France
Died	16 March 1950(1950-03-16) (aged 73) Le Mans, Sarthe, France
Education	University of Paris
Known for	Advances in radiation therapy
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Henri Coutard^[a] (27 August 1876 – 16 March 1950) was a French radiation therapist. He is known for his studies of radiation therapy for the treatment of laryngeal cancer and the development of the "protracted-fractional method" of radiation dosing.

Born in Marolles-les-Braults in the French department of Sarthe, Coutard attended medical school at University of Paris and graduated in 1902. He served in the French Army and lived for several years in the Jura Mountains before returning to Paris to study the medical applications of radium. During World War I, he worked in one of the radiological ambulance units overseen by the Polish-French physicist and chemist Marie Curie. He became the chief of the X-ray department at the Radium Institute of the University of Paris in 1919, working closely with Claudius Regaud and other scientists. Coutard's early work demonstrating the efficacy of radiating patients with laryngeal cancer led to the adoption of radiation therapy as a primary course of cancer treatment. The protracted-fractional method consisted of long durations of radiation applied over several weeks.

In the late 1930s, Coutard moved to the United States, first working at the California Institute of Technology and then at the Chicago Tumor Institute. During this time, he accompanied the American entrepreneur Spencer Penrose to Colorado Springs to treat Penrose's esophageal cancer. After Penrose's death in 1939, his radiotherapy equipment was donated to Penrose Hospital and Coutard became a radiotherapist at the newly-established Penrose Tumor Clinic. In the last decade of his life, Coutard's research became more erratic. He published a monograph in 1949 that was largely ignored by reputable journals and his peers. He experienced an intracerebral hemorrhage in December 1949 and died in Le Mans a few months later.

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