Pierre Nicolas Gerdy

Pierre Nicolas Gerdy (May 1, 1797 - March 18, 1856) was a French physician who was a native of Loches. He was a professor with the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and worked with the greatest Parisian surgeons of the early and mid-19th century, including Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin (1790-1847), Armand Velpeau (1795-1867) and Guillaume Dupuytren (1777-1835). The famed anatomist Paul Broca (1824-1880) was an assistant to Gerdy for several years during the 1840s.

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Gerdy was known for contributions as a surgeon, anatomist, pathologist and physiologist. He also worked with artists and sculptors, and in 1821 published Anatomie des formes extérieures du corps humain, appliqué à la peinture, à la sculpture et à la chirurgie, which was a book of anatomy as it applied to sculpture, painting and surgery. Gerdy is also remembered for his description of numerous eponymous parts of the anatomy. However, several of these names have since been replaced by clinical nomenclature:

• Gerdy's fibers: Superficial transverse metacarpal ligament
• Gerdy's fontanelle: sagittal fontanelle
• Gerdy's hyoid fossa: Trigonum caroticum
• Gerdy's interatrial loop: A muscular fasciculus in the interatrial septum of the heart, passing backward from the atrioventricular groove.
• Gerdy's ligament: Suspensory ligament of axilla
• Gerdy's tubercle: lateral tubercle of the tibia (Eponym actively used in medicine today).

References

• MedicineWord, Definition of Eponyms
• Timothy C. Beals, "So who was Gerdy?, and how did he get his own tubercule?", The American Journal of Orthopedics, Nov. 1996 p. 750-752.