Claude-Henri Chouard

His father, Pierre Chouard (1903–1983), was Professor of Plant Physiology at the Sorbonne, and founder and director of the Gif-sur-Yvette Phytotron.

He was a Lay Dominican and for many years President of the International Society of St Vincent De Paul.

His grandfather, Jules Chouard, was a journalist and a writer.

His great grandfather, Martin-Jules Chouard, was a primary school teacher and a painter.

His mother, Denise Petit-Dutaillis, was the daughter of Dr Paul Petit-Dutaillis, a navy surgeon and, later, a gynaecologist at Saint Michel Hospital, Paris.

His mother's uncle was Professor Charles Petit-Dutaillis, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and president of the Institut de France.

Her brother was Professor Daniel Petit-Dutaillis, a neurosurgeon at Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital and a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine.

Claude-Henri Chouard married Isabelle, the elder daughter of the four girls of Pierre Sainflou (1917–2007) Polytechnitien, X- 37, scientific film-maker: they had 4 children.

Claude-Henri Chouard initially trained under neurologist Raymond Garcin and neuropsychiatrist Noël Peron, at Salpêtrière Hospital, before spending 30 months doing military service in Algeria.

He then completed his internship in the Paris hospital system, under Henri Guénin and Daniel Morel-Fatio, and later Paul Pialoux and Maurice Aubry, who were ENT specialists and members of the Académie de Médecine.

During his internship, he also studied politics and management at Sciences Po from Paris and completed research in neuroanatomy at André Delmas' laboratory, with Charles Eyriès.

For over half a century, Claude-Henri Chouard's passion has been the complex relationship between doctor and patient: this passion has been at the heart of all his clinical training and is the reason he has never stopped practising.

Claude-Henri Chouard has made a unique and personal contribution to all three fields in which he has worked.

The first two fields have often required him to draw on his surgical experience and clinical empathy.

Claude-Henri Chouard (born 3 July 1931) is a French surgeon.

In 1957, in Paris, André Djourno, a professor of medical physics, and Charles Eyriès, a Parisian otologist, restored basic hearing to a completely deaf patient with bilateral cholesteatoma by electrically stimulating acoustic nerve fibres still present in the inner ear.

Although this system—which was further developed several years later by William House in Los Angeles—represented huge progress in that it freed patients from the silence and isolation in which they were trapped as a result of total deafness, the device never managed to enable patients to identify words without lip reading.

After twelve years of trials, the researchers all agreed on one thing: to achieve the level of performance required to give these patients a comfortable social life, the cochlear implant would need several electrodes, so it could stimulate the different frequency regions on the "cochlear keyboard", which were identified by 1961 Nobel Prize winner Georg von Békésy.

However, all the researchers hesitated in moving forward, fearful of failure and major complications.

He was director of the AP-HP (Paris hospital group) Laboratory of Auditory Prosthesis and director of the ENT Research Laboratory at Paris-Saint-Antoine University Hospital from 1967 to 2001.

He achieved worldwide recognition in the late 1970s thanks to the work completed by his Paris laboratory's multidisciplinary team on the multichannel cochlear implant.

This implanted electronic hearing device was developed at Saint-Antoine and alleviates bilateral total deafness.

In 1973, after closely studying the tentative results achieved thus far, C.H. Chouard and Dr P. MacLeod, who had completed their medical training together, decided to tackle the problem.

P. MacLeod was by now a researcher specialising in sensory physiology, while C.H. Chouard had personal experience of performing surgery on the facial and vestibular nerves.

They decided to combine these skills and form a multidisciplinary team within the ENT Research Laboratory at Saint-Antoine University Hospital in Paris.

The multichannel cochlear implant was designed and developed in 1975 at Saint-Antoine Hospital by a multidisciplinary team formed by Patrick MacLeod and Claude-Henri Chouard for this very purpose.

In 1975, they performed a fully ethical study on three patients with recent traumatic unilateral total deafness and total facial paralysis, which required surgery.

The study showed that selective electrical stimulation of eight to twelve electrodes, each isolated from the others, placed in different locations within the tympanic duct of the cochlear, resulted in the perception of different frequencies.

Then, after developing a round window electrical stimulation test to confirm the presence of functional auditory fibres, the Paris-based team applied the electrode implantation technique to five patients with historic bilateral total deafness.

Following the surgery, and after undergoing relatively brief speech therapy, all the patients—who were totally deaf—were able to recognise a varying percentage of words without lip reading.

French company Bertin was then selected to manufacture a functional implantable device, under the scientific direction of P. MacLeod.

The table-top device was built quickly, but the untimely death of Jean Bertin at the end of 1975 resulted in the company being restructured, and the French researchers had to wait until summer 1976 to finally receive the first six devices.

However, the core principles established by the researchers in the patents taken out by Bertin Technologies in 1977 are still used by today's manufacturers of multichannel implanted auditory prostheses, both intracochlear and auditory brain stem.

He was also head of the institution's ENT Department from 1978 to 1998.

In 1982, he was elected a member of the International Collegium ORL-AS.

When implanted early in young children, it can also help overcome the spoken language problems associated with deafness.

Claude-Henri Chouard comes from a long line of academics and doctors.

For over eight years, these researchers were well ahead of all the other international teams,

/> until the collapse of French company Bertin temporarily put paid to their progress.

An otologist, he has been a full member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine (French National Academy of Medicine) since 1999.