Henri Coutard (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.
Early life and education Henri Coutard was born on 27 August 1876 in Marolles-les-Braults in the French department of Sarthe. His father, Louis Coutard, was a local government official, and his mother, Mélanie Marie Joséphine Coutard (née Ragot), sold novelty items. He had an older brother, Louis, and a younger sister, Helène. In 1887, Coutard enrolled at the Lycée Montesquieu, a state boarding school in Le Mans. He received a baccalauréat in literature in 1893 and another in mathematics the following year. During this time, he also received an award for excellence in his school's military and gymnastics programs. After secondary school, he entered medical school at the University of Paris, training in Parisian hospitals and completing an internship in Nantes. His doctoral thesis was titled Lesions extrapéritonéales de la vessie et du rectum dans les fractures du bassin ("Extraperitoneal lesions of the bladder and rectum observed in cases of pelvic fracture"). It summarised eight cases from the literature and one from his previous patients. He defended his thesis on 17 July 1902.
Career
Military service and interest in radium After medical school, Coutard enrolled as a medical officer and captain in the Chasseurs Alpins, the elite mountain infantry force of the French Army. After contracting pulmonary tuberculosis he moved to the Jura Mountains to recover, and during that time practiced general medicine. In 1912, he returned to Paris after becoming interested in the potential medical applications of radioactivity. Radioactivity had first been discovered in the element uranium by the physicist Henri Becquerel in 1896, and over the next several years, the French researchers Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactivity of additional elements: thorium, polonium, and radium. Coutard began studying the properties of radium at an experimental laboratory co-founded by the physicist Jacques Danne. His research centred on therapeutic applications of radium in animals, and he presented his work at the 1912 meeting of the French Association for the Advancement of Science. Coutard was drafted during World War I and worked as a radiation therapist in a military hospital near Baccarat, Meurthe-et-Moselle, on the Eastern Front. There, he met Claudius Regaud, a radiobiologist with whom he later collaborated. Coutard also worked in one of the radiological ambulance units overseen by Marie Curie. He attained the rank of major by the end of the war.
Radium Institute
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