Paul Carnot (16 January 1869, in Limoges – 1 April 1957, in Paris) was a French physician.
He served as médecin des hôpitaux in Paris, becoming a professor of therapeutic medicine in 1918 to the Paris medical faculty. In 1922 he was elected as a member to the Académie de Médecine.[1]
In 1906 he coined the term hémopoïétine (hemopoietin) to define a humoral factor he believed was responsible for regulation of red blood cell production. This being based on experiments with laboratory rabbits that he conducted with his graduate student Clotilde-Camille DeFlandre.[2] They noticed that an increase of reticulocytes in normal rabbits occurred following the injection of blood plasma taken from anemic donor rabbits who had earlier been subject to bloodletting.[3] Findings from their research were published in a paper titled Sur l'activité hémopoïétique du sérum au cours de la régénération du sang (On the hemopoietic activity of serum during the regeneration of blood).[4]
Carnot was the author of numerous treatises on a wide array of medical subjects. With Paul Brouardel (1837–1906), Augustin Nicolas Gilbert (1858–1927) and others, he published the multi-volume Nouveau traité de médecine et de thérapeutique. The following are a few of his better known writings:
His great-grand-father was Lazare Carnot, a French general,[5] his father, Marie Adolphe Carnot was an engineer, head of the French École des Mines de Paris.[6]