Philippe Jean Pelletan

Philippe Jean Pelletan

Philippe Jean Pelletan (born May 4, 1747 in Paris , † September 26, 1829 in Bourg-la-Reine ) was a French surgeon and obstetrician.

Pelletan was born the son of a surgeon in Paris and studied literature, surgery and anatomy there. He was a member of the Académie nationale de Médecine and the Académie des sciences . At the University of Paris he worked at the Medical Faculty as a professor of clinical surgery. After the outbreak of the revolution , he was appointed surgeon in the National Guard in 1789 . On July 13, 1793, shortly after the fatal assassination attempt on Jean Paul Marat, he was at the scene and signed Marat's death certificate. In 1795 he succeeded Pierre-Joseph Desault as chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris . After the death of ten-year-old Crown Prince Louis Charles de Bourbon on June 8, 1795, Pelletan performed the autopsy and removed the prince's heart, which he preserved in alcohol. It is today the only mortal remains of Louis XVII. kept in the basilica of Saint-Denis . In 1804 Pelletan became Napoleon Bonaparte's surgical advisor on the advice of the imperial personal physician Jean-Nicolas Corvisart . As chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu, Pelletan was responsible for a misdiagnosis that led to the death of an officer close to Tsar Alexander I of Russia . He was then denounced by his colleague Guillaume Dupuytren to the Tsar, who demanded a trial against Pelletan, and as a result, removed from his office on September 6, 1815. He had received the chair for operative medicine in 1815 and from 1818 to 1823 he worked on the chair for obstetrics. Afterwards he was demoted to honorary professor. His successor as chief surgeon was Dupuytren. His son Pierre Pelletan also worked as a doctor.

literature

• Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Pelletan, Philippe Jean. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1119 f.