Homage to Pierre Sabin, a brilliant, inspiring and close caregiver

Pierre Sabin died at the age of 70 on November 23, 2019, a fateful day that saw the death of one of the most atypical, brilliant and engaging characters in our specialty. His career is exceptional. Having a CAP as a turner, he enrolled in medical studies at the end of the 1960s. “Because there were girls” he said at a time when this kind of thing could still be said.

It was in Tours that he studied and on the benches of this faculty that he met Line, the one who would become “his Doudou”, a Guadeloupean woman like him. When you are a doctor, when you are looking for a specialty, when you have gold in your hands and brilliant ideas, in short, when you are Pierre Sabin, you therefore choose stomatology, which he taught at what was then the Institute of Stomatology of Pitié-Salpetrière.

A terrible family drama will then profoundly change Pierre's career. In 1995, at the University Hospital of Caen, he carried out the first installation of an extra-oral implant, epithesis and implant-supported maxillofacial prosthesis. For this reason, he directed the university diploma in applied facial prosthesis at Paris VI.

This experience earned him the recognition of our specialty, confirmed by the presidency of the French Society of Stomatology and Maxillofacial Surgery and the organization of the National Congress in 2008 in Rouen. Pierre had a conviction, an obsession: the implantology techniques familiar to our specialty should be able to be exported to other medical doctors. He was convinced that cardiac surgery, orthopedics, neurology, neurosurgery could benefit from his research in implantology and connectivity. His brilliant ideas, rewarded with several national and European awards, unfortunately shattered the principles of providing funding, unfair measures that caused him to leave all his savings there. He had also invented a phantom model that “bled” to learn about implantology.

Very attached to Guadeloupe, Pierre Sabin designed a superb implantology center there that met all health and organizational requirements, inaugurated in April 2008. He dreamed of setting up the conditions for access to implantology for all scholarships. This aspiration summed up the character and illustrated this combination of human, intellectual, and professional qualities. One of his latest projects was, in fact, the opening of a structure that would better welcome migrants.

Pierre was a craftsman and always insisted on the values of companionship in our profession. He did not hesitate to cross France at the request of patients requiring his expertise. Empathy and generosity, fidelity in friendship and seduction, curiosity and ingenuity, tenacity and hard work, skill and finesse inhabited Pierre. Surely, and with good reason, some will find this list to be very incomplete. Our specialty should not forget what it owes to Pierre Sabin and sends all its condolences and the affection that we all have for him to his family and loved ones. You wanted it to be on your island of Guadeloupe that the disease takes your life, Pierre. It's done and we already miss you.

~ Professor Patrick Goudot, Head of Department at La Pitié Salpetrière Hospital in Paris, Professor Dominique Goga, Head of Department at the University Hospital of Tours, Professor Hervé Benateau, Head of Department at the University Hospital of Caen, as well as Professors Hardy and Tulasne.