Caesar Alphonse RU - Professor, founder of reconstructive surgery of the gastrointestinal tract. To the 165th of birthday

Cesar Alfonce Roux was born on March 23, 1857 in the Swiss Republic, in the town of Mont-La-Ville, canton of Vaud. He did not belong to the medical elite of that time, as he grew up in a poor family, having been accustomed to work since childhood and endowed with a sense of responsibility. His father worked as a school inspector, and Caesar himself was the oldest among his eleven brothers and sisters. After graduating from a local school and college, on the instructions of a family friend – a rural doctor - he decides to enter the medical faculty. Due to the fact that Caesar Roux's family was from among the French Huguenots, which excluded the possibility of studying at the universities of Lausanne or Geneva, he chose the faculty in Bern. In it, Caesar, in addition to studying, also combined work as a laboratory assistant at the departments of anatomy, physiology and, finally, pathological anatomy. Being an extraordinary person and a great workaholic, by the end of his studies he was noticed by one of the "masters" of surgery at that time – Theodor Kocher, who offered him an internship at the clinic "Hôpital de l'Isle". At this time, Caesar also managed to visit Vienna and get acquainted with the works of advanced surgeons of his time. In 1884, he began working as a doctor in the city of Lausanne. Due to his professional qualities, great humanism and mercy, Caesar is gaining popularity relatively quickly and already in 1887 he headed the surgical department. After 3 years, the Faculty of Medicine opens in Lausanne, where Caesar Roux receives a professorship. Over time, he brought his department to an unattainable level and Lausanne became one of the centers of European surgery.
It is necessary to note the huge range of surgical areas in which there are author's innovations of Caesar Ru, but he considered abdominal surgery and surgical gastroenterology to be his most favorite sections of medicine. It was the achievements in the latter field that immortalized his name. The technique of turning off the loop of the small intestine has firmly taken its place in surgery and is widely used in our time. The famous Y-shaped anastomosis performed during gastric resection according to Billrot-II in the Ru modification is still showing good long-term results. Among the achievements of the great surgeon are operations for pre–thoracic plastic surgery of the esophagus with a small intestine. In 1883, Caesar Roux first applied the method of surgical treatment of acute appendicitis – appendectomy, and already in 1888 the operation became officially recognized. He proposed a huge number of author's surgical interventions not only in abdominal, but also in thoracic surgery, urology, and even in operative endocrinology, because Caesar Ru continued the work of Emil Theodor Kocher, developing surgical treatment of goiter. Under the leadership of Caesar Ru, 126 scientific studies were defended (almost all of them doctoral dissertations) and a large number of students were trained, who later became famous surgeons. Among them is Peter Alexandrovich Herzen, the founder of oncology in Russia, one of the world's first female surgeons in the world, Vera Ignatievna Giedroyts, who defended her doctoral dissertation, proving the high efficiency of the method of inguinal hernia repair using the Ru method.
Caesar Roux worked as a professor in Lausanne until 1926, when he had to retire due to deteriorating health, but even after that he still continued to operate, work in the clinic. On December 21, 1934, during a patient's consultation, the surgeon's heart, weakened by long-standing angina, could not stand it.
Caesar Ru has left us a magnificent legacy among the author's operations, talented students, and in the memory of his contemporaries he is imprinted as a great professional in his field, a man with a big soul, mercy and simplicity.