Philippe-Jean Pelletan

Philippe-Jean Pelletan (4 May 1747 to 26 September 1829) was a French surgeon born in Paris, the son of a surgeon. He was a member of the Académie Royale de Chirurgie and of the Académie des Sciences, a professor at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris, and in 1789 was elected surgeon of the Garde Nationale. In 1795 he succeeded Pierre-Joseph Desault as chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu, and in the same year, after the death of the ten-year-old Louis XVII on 8 June, he was responsible for performing the autopsy. In 1804 Jean-Nicolas Corvisart had him appointed consultant-surgeon to the Emperor Napoleon. A misdiagnosis at the Hôtel-Dieu that led to a patient's death brought an investigation, and on 6 September 1815 Guillaume Dupuytren was named to replace him as chief surgeon.