With a reassuring smile, Tessier examined the girl's face. Then he nodded at the twins, their parents and a cluster of doctors gathered around. The girl could be helped.
If any surgeon in the world can correct nature's hideous mistakes, it is Tessier. The intense, tireless 57-year-old Frenchman has revolutionized treatment of what doctors call "craniofacial anomalies"—birth defects that misshape the skull and facial tissues.
The condition historically has caused its victims to be ostracized and often hidden away in institutions, even when there was no accompanying mental damage. But in the past 10 years Tessier has operated on 500 such patients—operations that sometimes involve more than 100 intricate surgical procedures and last for hours. Because of the proximity of the brain and fear of damaging the eyes, extensive surgery on the skull was long considered precariously dangerous. Tessier has boldly ventured into this no-man's-land, restoring normal or near-normal faces and lives to the "anomalies."
Nevertheless, Tessier—who has driven race cars, dived with Jacques Cousteau and hunted elephants in central Africa during infrequent but all-out respites from medicine—is given to understatement about his work. "I've had some good ideas and some bad ones," he says. "I've spent a lot of my time checking which are right and which are wrong. If one thing doesn't work, then I look somewhere else."
Such is his reputation that he spends about five months each year traveling around the world to demonstrate his techniques to other doctors. "I share everything," Tessier says truthfully. Two of those months are usually devoted to the United States, and last October the American College of Surgeons made Tessier an honorary fellow. It said "his surgical courage and imagination" have had "monumental impact on the development of an entirely new surgical subspecialty."
After attending medical school in Nantes in the Loire Valley, near where he grew up, Tessier began to specialize in orthopedic surgery. (He was the first doctor in his family; his parents were merchants.) When World War II broke out, he was inducted into the army and was captured in June 1940 as the Nazis advanced into Brittany. The Germans released him from prison camp about a year later, thinking that he had a fatal case of typhoid fever. He spent the rest of the war working at a military center for facial surgery in Paris.
After the war, he studied under Sir Harold Gillies, an eminent British plastic surgeon, who performed an experimental operation on a patient with Crouzon's disease, which causes protruding eyeballs and underdevelopment of the upper jaw. When the surgery failed, Gillies announced it could never be successfully performed. Tessier disagreed.
While he supported himself, handsomely, by beautifying the faces of Paris' chic set with cosmetic plastic surgery, Tessier continued to research cranial reconstruction during the 1950s and early '60s. Often after a full day of surgery in Paris, he took the train 250 miles to his old medical school at Nantes, where he would operate on cadavers until 2 a.m., then return to Paris.
During this period he was also racing stock cars under the name of Harry Convert—a pun on the French words for green beans, haricots verts. These days he prefers not to talk about his racing career, but does point out, "I never had a major accident." Some of his friends hint that Tessier still seems to be going for the checkered flag when he navigates through the chaotic traffic of Paris.
He also was one of the first scuba divers in France, working with Cousteau as early as 1949, "back in the days," he says, "when there were no rules."
Tessier's main hobby now is hunting and exploring in Africa. He spent seven weeks in a remote area of the Central African Republic last spring, living partly off berries and game he shot himself in what he glowingly describes as "a beautiful river area where there is no one."
"Sometimes I get a little lost," he says, "but never totally. I'm fascinated now by elephants and would like to spend the three years necessary to study a herd there, but I have other things to do."
By 1967 Tessier was ready to publicize his surgical techniques, of which a recent operation in Paris to correct hypertelorism is illustrative. (It is a congenital deformity in which the eyes are set too far apart.) In five hours, he opened the upper half of an 11-year-old girl's head to narrow the space between the eyes and grafted rib bone below the right eye. He reconstructed the patient's nose, which had been cut away during the operation, and with ease and precision turned a loose flap of skin back into a face.
Medical colleagues acknowledge their awe of Tessier. Dr. Samuel Pruzansky, director of the Center for Craniofacial Anomalies at the University of Illinois—Chicago, terms him frankly formidable. Another Chicago plastic surgeon says of Tessier: "He's not just an expert surgeon and an expert innovator. He makes up a lot of the surgery and even changes techniques on the operating table. If you thought you knew what he did last year, you would not recognize it as the same operation this year." His techniques are radical, but early on Tessier convinced the international medical community of their validity by inviting 80 of the world's best plastic surgeons to come to Paris to observe him operate. Soon he was the one being invited; he says, "To teach, I'm condemned to travel." Each visit to a hospital is aimed at building a surgical team like his own.
Tessier wastes few words and little time. He works seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day, sometimes outlasting two teams of assistants. On a recent trip to Chicago he began a grueling day at 7:30 a.m., examining patients straight through with only a brown-bag lunch, and caught a late plane for San Francisco.
His approach is so unrelentingly professional, in fact, that one of his closest associates in Paris did not learn of either Tessier's marriage to his second wife, Mireille, or the birth of the couple's now 9-month-old daughter, Laurence, until months afterward.
Visiting surgeons crowd into the operating room to watch Tessier and his team, which sometimes numbers as many as 15 doctors and nurses. A permanent assistant to Tessier, Dr. Gilbert Ozun, says, however, "He is alone. It is not a team who operates. We just look and profit."
Dr. Tessier admits to discouragement, "but it doesn't last long. I push forward. Looking to clarify the unknown is somewhere between challenge and curiosity for me." He adds, politely, "I don't try to explain it—or myself."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
