Benoît Lengelé

Benoît Lengelé is a doctor, anatomist and Belgian surgeon, born in Brussels.

Early Life

Born in Brussels, Benoît Lengelé was a very precocious child and early in his young years began to develop a deep interest in anatomy. At the end of his secondary studies he had already acquired an extended knowledge of the basic anatomy that was being taught only in the first years of university medical studies. After high school he very naturally went on to study medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven and is reported to have been a top of the class in almost all years. Rumours purportedly report that his anatomy teacher, Albert De Coninck, a founding father of microsurgery in Belgium, while famous for his severity and difficulty to pass during exams and would only award a maximum grade if the student knew more than him, gave him once a 21 out of 20.

He began to get interested, as soon as the beginning of his studies, by face morphology, and achieved numerous research work on the embryonic development of the skull, face growing and face modifications caused by aging, which he treats in his aggregation thesis and his inaugural lesson.

Work

As the Titulary Professor of the Chair of Human Anatomy at the Université Catholique de LouvainCatholic University of Louvain, he is also chief of the department of Experimental Morphology.

Pursuing in parallel a formation in plastic surgery, he stayed in 1991 in the service of maxillo-facial surgery of the Central University Hospital in Amiens, where he met Bernard Duchauvelle and Sylvie Testelin. With his colleagues, he developed serveral new techniques aimed at reconstructing by microsurgery, specific parts of the head and the neck, such as the larynx or the inferior lip. Together, they come however to the conclusion that results obtained by these autotransplants are imperfect and emit the idea that face allografts could be used to repair patients suffering from severe disfigurations.

On 26th November, 2005, Benoît Lengelé performed, with Bernard Dechauvelle and Sylvie Testelin in Amiens, the first partial face allograft to repair the mutilated face of Isabelle Dinoire, a young woman severely bitten by dog which had ripped her nose, lips and chin.

In addition, Benoît Lengelé is a gifted artist, to the point that the periodical Louvain, making him the Belgian scientific personality of 2006, described him as "the Master of the Art of Portrait".

Source

• Benoît Lengelé