Denis Jourdanet

Denis Jourdanet ( born May 1, 1815 in Juillan, Hautes -Pyrénées, † May 6, 1892 in Paris) was a French physician and physiologist.

Short Biography

Jourdanet undertook in the 60s of the 19th century as a collaborator of Paul Bert, a research trip to South America. This important findings on the effects of air pressure were obtained on the human body. Jourdanet set the first time a connection between the reduced oxygen tension in the tissues ( so-called hypoxia) and simultaneously increasing the production of red blood cells ( erythrocytes ). He realized that the symptoms of altitude sickness as he watched her with climbers in the Andes, and the symptoms of classic anemia can be attributed to the same cause. Jourdanets work provided the basis for the theory of a humoral factor responsible for the production of erythrocytes. Nearly a century after Jourdanet this factor by Allan Jacob Erslev and Eugene Goldwasser was identified as erythropoietin.