Thomas Pettigrew

Thomas Joseph Pettigrew (1791 to 1865) was an English surgeon and antiquarian who became known in nineteenth-century London as an authority on Ancient Egyptian mummies. Born in London to a surgeon-apothecary father, he was apprenticed at sixteen to the surgeon John Taunton and helped found the City Philosophical Society as a teenager. He served as secretary to the Medical Society of London and the Royal Humane Society, acted as surgeon to the Duke of Sussex and the Duke of Kent, vaccinated the future Queen Victoria, and taught anatomy, physiology, pathology and surgery at Charing Cross Hospital. His unrollings and autopsies of mummies, held as social entertainments, led to his History of Egyptian Mummies in 1834. He also wrote on cholera, medical superstitions and medical biography, and retired from medicine after 1854 to pursue antiquarian work.