Who was George Noulis and why his name was given to the Association
George Noulis was a distinguished Hellenic doctor. He was born in 1849 in a village of Ioannina region in the era when that part of Greece had not been liberated from the Turks. He finished his basic education at the Zosimea school. He then studied medicine at the Athens University from which he took his degree in 1871.
He then moved to Paris for further training. Those times the field of knee surgery was dominated by French and German doctors. The main representative of the French school was Paul F. Segond (1851-1912): the well-known avulsion fractures of posterolateral tibial plateau are after his name.
George Noulis was one of Segond’s fellows and he completed his doctorate after the name Entorse du Genou” (knee sprain). Amids his doctorate, George Noulis describes clearly the clinical test widely known as “Lachman test” nowadays. As such, Noulis was probably the first author to give a detailed description of what we know today as “Lachman’s test”.
In 1992 the famous German orthopaedic surgeon HH Paessler published a paper in American Journal of Sports Medicine under the name “How new is the Lachman’s test?”. He tried to investigate the scientist who first described this test. According to this, the first to describe it was George Noulis.
In honor of this forgotten compatriot of ours, who should be considered as the Greek pioneer in knee conditions, we gave his name to our Association.