Enrique Finochietto (March 13, 1881 – February 17, 1948) was a distinguished Argentine academic, physician and inventor. Life and work Enrique Finochietto was born in 1881 in Buenos Aires to Ana and Tomás Finochietto. His father died during his early childhood, and he was raised mostly by his mother. He excelled in industrial design while in secondary school, and enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires in 1897. Finochietto interned at the university's Clinical Hospital, becoming an assistant to a noted surgeon, Dr. Alejandro Posadas. His thesis, El Pie-Bot Varus-Equino-Congénito, earned him a medical degree with honors, in 1904. He entered the Clinic of Skin and Venereal Diseases, a dependency of Buenos Aires' important Rawson Hospital, as a surgical intern. Finochietto studied nose and throat, gynecological and orthopedic surgical practices in numerous western European hospitals from 1906 to 1909 and, on his return, he was appointed chief of a surgical division at Rawson Hospital – where he lived in order to be on hand for emergencies. He returned to Europe in 1918, working during World War I in the Argentine Hospital for the Wounded in Passy, near Paris. For these efforts, he received the Legion of Honor and the Red Cross Medal, in 1919. Finochietto then traveled to the United States to observe surgical practices at the Mayo Clinic and other prominent hospitals, before returning to Argentina. The surgeon returned to Buenos Aires, where he was named the chief of the surgical division at Rawson Hospital, then undergoing an extensive enlargement and modernization. Finochietto planned the new surgical pavilion (Pavilion IX), where he worked alongside his brothers, Drs. Miguel Ángel and Ricardo Finochietto. Pavilion IX included numerous innovations of his design such as an outpatient department with separate dressing and examining rooms, separate sterile dressing packages, a narrower stretcher (that could maneuver through the halls more easily), separate departments of orthopedic surgery, endoscopy and pathology (among others), and laboratories and radiology departments in the hospital itself. He also eliminated the unwieldy book form of medical records that had existed previously, and instead created separate envelopes for patients. Dr. Finochietto not only changed the way surgical pavilions were organized and operated, he also invented many surgical instruments, having sixty-seven inventions to his credit. These included an electric surgical table which allowed a patient to be moved to any position, a special orthopedic table, a thoracic rib spreader (1936), the surgical vacuum,