René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes

René-Nicolas Dufriche, baron Desgenettes, was a French military doctor born in Alençon in 1762 and dead in Paris in 1837. After medical studies in Paris, London and Italy and a doctorate at Montpellier, he served from 1793 as an army surgeon and later became chief physician of Napoleon's Armée d'Orient in Egypt and Syria, where he introduced hygiene and preventive measures against disease and faced an epidemic of bubonic plague. He refused Bonaparte's demand that plague patients be killed with opium at the siege of Acre. He was later chief doctor of the Grande Armée and of the Imperial Guard, including at Waterloo, taught physiology and hygiene in Paris, and wrote the Histoire médicale de l'armée d'Orient.