Born at St Léonard (Oise) on August 15th, 1843, the son of Just Lucas-Championnière, a distinguished Parisian physician and medical writer, whose father was a leader in the war in La Vendée. He was educated at the Collège Rollin, and studied medicine at the University of Paris, becoming Interne of the Hospitals in 1865, gaining the Silver Medal of the interneship in 1869, and graduating MD in 1870. He was appointed Surgeon to the Hospitals in 1874. His first service was at the 'maternity' of the Hôpital Cochin, where he was appointed Surgeon-in-Chief. Later he directed the surgical services of the hospitals Tenon, Saint-Louis, Beaujon, and finally the Hôtel-Dieu. He retired in 1906. After he had served his term of office as Interne, he went abroad and was attracted from London to Glasgow by the growing fame of Lister. He saw, understood, and returned to France in 1868 to proclaim that a new era in surgery had dawned. He met with indifference, with ridicule, with opposition, and finally with the retort that others had used carbolic acid as a surgical dressing. But he had the root of the matter in him, had grasped the principles for which Lister fought, and lived on through the antiseptic period into that of asepsis, with which he never brought himself to be in full sympathy. His fame rests on his advocacy of antisepsis on the Continent, and his treatment of simple fractures. The history of his study of the treatment of fractures of the long bones may perhaps be related in his own words. In the address he delivered before the Cardiff Medical Society in 1909 he recalled the spirit of the method which served as a clue to guide him:- "It is, in fact, true that each successive step can be traced in the history of my various trials and investigations, and in the order in which my various applications of the method succeeded one another. I began by lessening the degree of immobility; next I did away with it altogether; next I began to use movements at an early stage; then I began to use them immediately after the injury; finally, I made use of massage - that is to say, of a method of mobilizing the muscles, joints, and even the bony fragments. It was necessary to define the indications and the limits of this special form of movement. Thus it was that years of observation and experiment led me to establish the bold practice of methodical therapeutic mobilization." He embodied his final views on the treatment of fractures by massage and mobilization in a volume published in 1910. Exaggeration of this method of treatment gave bad results and led to fixation of fractures through an open operation. As Surgeon to the Paris hospitals he was actively engaged in teaching for a great part of his life, but he also found time for much important literary work and edited the *Journal de Médecine et de Chirurgie Pratiques*, which his father had founded. In 1875 he again visited Lister, who was in Edinburgh, and published his admirable work on the principles and application of antiseptic surgery. He traced the history of Lister's work in the Lister Jubilee Number of the *British Medical Journal* (1902, ii, 1819) in an article headed, "An Essay in Scientific Surgery. The Antiseptic Method of Lister in the Present and in the Future." His health gave way some years before his death, and at the Sheffield Meeting of the British Medical Association in 1908 he appeared frail and subdued. But he soon regained his old buoyancy and vigour, and was a remarkable instance of health at the age of 70, when he came to London in August, 1913, as President of the Fifth Congress of the Medical Press. He had long been interested in the subject of prehistoric trephining, having written a Prize Essay on trephining and cerebral localization in 1876, and he had been invited to give an address on the subject on Oct 25th at the annual public meeting of the five Academies which form the Institut de France. On October 22nd, 1913, he was reading an essay on "Prehistoric Trephining" to a Committee of the Institut de France when he suddenly collapsed and died. The portrait of this faithful friend of English Surgery is in the College Collection, and another accompanies his *Lancet* biography (1913, ii, 1285). His bibliography is contained in the *Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office* (series i and ii).