The Most Influential Scientists in the Development of Medical Informatics (21): Antoine Remond (1917-1998)

Antoine Remond (1917-1998) is a French researcher, neurologist and clinical electrophysiologist. He is considered one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience (1-4). He was born in Argentina in 1917 in a scientific family. After his graduation as a doctor, his parents suggested that he “do his medicine”, seeing his fascination by brain and its waves. His father, a chemist, remembers an uncle in a hospital in Paris who was interested in similar problematics. Remond remembered an invitation by his parents uncle, Alphonse Baldwin, Professor of General Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, who also had a service at the H？tel-Dieu. After hearing for work of Hans Berger, he went to see him. Then, on his return to Paris, he found ways to implement instrumentation electroencephalography, one of the first in France. When Remond was the first year of medicine at Paris in 1936, he was working at his uncle’s hospital and learning about the pathology with the highly respected and feared anatomy professor André Hovelacque (1880-1939). When war broke out, Remond managed to escape. He spent the war hidden in the pathology laboratory in Sainte-Anne and discovered electroencephalographic experimentation with his wife, Fischgold who have already published some articles with A. Baldwin, R. and J. Caussé Lerique. On a device with two feathers and another four feathers, the laboratory technician is able to achieve a six feathers; the Faraday cage. Remond also had the opportunity to work at the end of the war with Pierre Puech, in its new service neuro-psycho-surgery Sainte-Anne supported by Baldwin, where he experimented with psycho-surgery, but also the location of tumors brain by electroencephalography, after the pioneering work of Grey Walter, and patients with encephalitis or epilepsy. The first International Congress of Electroencephalography held in London in 1947, and gave Remond opportunity to visit the laboratory of Grey Walter in Bristol, pioneer of electroencephalography, in which he met the neurologist Marseille, Henri Gastaut, who practices electroencephalography for the clinical diagnosis of epilepsy. In 1948, the French society for electroencephalography formed and Remond became its secretary. In 1957-1958 Remond opened a private practice and conducted experiments in treatment of parkinsonism and stereotactic ablative stimulation, like those practiced in the same period. He has been elected as Honorary Fellow of European Federation for Medical Informatics (FEFMI) in 1985