EShe was the first woman to become a heart surgeon in France. She was also a pioneer in pediatric cardiac surgery. Saturday June 15, Francine Leca died at the age of 86, we learned from the Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiac association, of which she is the founder. “A child’s heart was for her like a work of art that she wanted to restore,” responded Pascale Grais-Lacour, former director of the association’s medical center.
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It was in 1971, after attending his first heart operation at the Laennec hospital in Paris, that his long career began. It is then a “revelation” for someone who is still a student and is heading towards hand surgery.
She then decided to specialize in pediatric cardiac surgery, “a man’s world”, remembers Pascale Grais-Lacour, who worked alongside her for forty-five years.
Five thousand children from poor countries operated on
In 1996, Francine Leca founded the Mécénat Cardiac Surgery association, after receiving a desperate letter from an Iranian father who was unable to have his child’s heart operated on in his country.
Since then, this association has operated on five thousand children suffering from heart defects in around sixty countries where there is a lack of means to access this expensive surgery.
Francine Leca had “remained close to many of her former patients whom she had operated on as children. She said: “I’m not a can opener, I operate on my patients and I follow them”, remembers her former colleague, paying tribute to “her attentiveness and her tolerance”.
