Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists: Gilles Montalescot
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Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists: Gilles Montalescot

E. Magnus Ohman, MD; Gilles Montalescot, MD, PhD

Disclosures

January 18, 2018

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E. Magnus Ohman, MD : Hello . I'm Magnus Ohman. Welcome to another edition of Life and Times of Leading Cardiologists. We are very fortunate to have a great contributor of science in cardiovascular medicine, Prof Gilles Montalescot. He is from Paris and Sorbonne University, which is world-famous, of course. Welcome.

Gilles Montalescot, MD, PhD: Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here.

Dr Ohman: You have had a very distinguished career, mostly focused around thrombosis, and we will talk a little bit about that later. Many of us have wondered: Where did Gilles come from and where did he grow up?

The Journey Begins in Paris

Prof Montalescot: I was born and raised in Paris—a nice city to grow up in. Actually, my family originates from the center of France, from what we call Limousin, which is in Périgord. It's a region of lakes and forests.

Dr Ohman: Famous for truffles?

Prof Montalescot: It's famous for truffles and mushrooms. It's kind of a wild area. The name "Montalescot" comes from the name of a village, and the family comes from here. Actually, my grandfather was in Périgord, and the first one to move to Paris was my father. My grandfather was a small farmer—two or three cows, one pig, and cultivating a few acres, and trying to survive in this region. After World War II, my father went to Paris and started working in Paris. No qualification, no diploma.

He became an employee of the French Railway Society. His job was to use big hammers to hit wheels on the trains just to make sure there were no faulty wheels, because if there was a faulty wheel, the train could not leave. That was his first job, but he had many others afterwards. The railway station was next to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.

Dr Ohman: Where you are now practicing?

Prof Montalescot: Exactly. Just behind the walls of the highway station from the hospital is the nursing school where my mother went.

An infant Montalescot with his mother.
Image courtesy of Prof Montalescot

Dr Ohman: Your mother was a nurse? You keep it very small, like on the farm. That is pretty good. Do you have brothers and sisters?

Prof Montalescot: I have a younger sister who lives in Marseille in the south of France. She works for a state organization allocating low-rent flats [apartments] to people with a low income.

Dr Ohman: That is a very honorable thing to do. So, you grew up in Paris.

Prof Montalescot: We lived in a suburb of Paris, close to the Marne River, and we had a happy life there. Our family was not poor, but not rich either. We had a nice living, with family values.

Dr Ohman: You were growing up in the '60s, I take it? There were some demonstrations in Paris, I remember.

Prof Montalescot: Yes. I was a little too young for that. My father did not like me to be outside in the manifestations, so I was not really part of it.

Education Was Very Important

Dr Ohman: Did they keep a studious check on you so that you focused on academics?

Prof Montalescot: Yes; education was very important at home. My father did not go to high school or to the university, so we could not miss school. We could not mess up at school. Education was part of life for my sister and me. We had to be good at school and we were checked on by my father.

Dr Ohman: Being a nurse, did your mother bring the topic of medicine to the household?

Prof Montalescot: Not really, but I remember that when she used to work on Sundays, my father, younger sister, and I would wait for her in front of the hospital door to come out.

Dr Ohman: You saw doctors coming out.

Prof Montalescot: Exactly. It started very early. Later, when I was a teenager, I went to the hospital where she was a nurse in the emergency room. I looked at all of the people waiting for care and all of the white coats trying to help the people. This was a fascination for me.

Dr Ohman: Fast-forward 30 years later or even more: You have been talking extensively about time-to-treatment for care of acute myocardial infarction. It's interesting how that came back. You finished your baccalauréat, the French high school degree. Did you go straight to medical school?

Prof Montalescot: I realized in the last year of high school that I would love to go to medical school. I went to the university and then started my medical studies.

Dr Ohman: The French system is competitive, am I correct? It's hard to get in, but once you are in, you are sort of set.

A very young Montalescot.
Image courtesy of Prof Montalescot

Prof Montalescot: Exactly.

Dr Ohman: Obviously your mother was a large influence, but was there anyone else during that school time who said you would be good at science?

Prof Montalescot: No. I am the first doctor in the family, and probably the last one too. My children will not go into medicine. I'm very happy to be a doctor, to be a cardiologist. Clearly, I think unconsciously my mother had a big influence on this decision.

Medical School, Residency, and an Important First Patient

Dr Ohman: Which medical school did you go to?

Prof Montalescot: A medical school in the suburb of Paris, in Créteil, as the French people would know. It is a very good medical school and I had a lot of mentors there. That was a good time.

The first day I was a resident, my first patient was the chief of cardiology.

Dr Ohman: Once you finished medical school, were people saying, "You should be a surgeon"? It was a big class, too—700, probably?

Prof Montalescot: I was attracted to cardiology quite rapidly. The first day I was a resident, my first patient was the chief of cardiology.

Dr Ohman: We are here at the American Heart Association (AHA), where the president of AHA had a heart attack, so none of us are protected. Interesting. Tell me what happened. Your chief of cardiology comes in with a heart attack.

Prof Montalescot: Yes. He was hospitalized in the first room of the cardiac care unit (CCU) in his own department. That was in 1981.

Dr Ohman: We had CCUs, but nothing else really in care, right?

Prof Montalescot: Aspirin, heparin, beta-blockers—that was about it.

Dr Ohman: Were you the intern?

Prof Montalescot: Yes. I was afraid to go into the room and start my first prescription of residency. He helped me. He told me, "I'm going to tell you what you should give me."

Dr Ohman: This is a wonderful patient. Let me take care of you. Presumably he did okay?

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