René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes

René-Nicolas Dufriche-Desgenettes
Portrait by Antoine-François Callet.
Born	23 May 1762 Alençon
Died	1837 Paris
Nationality	France
Occupation	Military doctor

René-Nicolas Dufriche, baron Desgenettes (23 May 1762, Alençon – 3 February 1837, Paris) was a French military doctor. He was chief doctor to the French army in Egypt and at Waterloo.

Son of a lawyer at the Parliament of Rouen, he first studied at the Jesuit college at Alençon. He studied classics at Collège Sainte-Barbe and the Collège du Plessis in Paris, but left off these studies to follow the course taught at the collège de France, from then on studying medicine with devotion. Trained in the hospital services of Pelletan and Vicq d’Azyr, he also studied under John Hunter in London and Desbois de Rochefort and Boyer in France. In trying to perfect his skills he made several journeys to England and Italy (spending 4 years at Florence and Siena then Rome and Naples), where his good manners brought him the acquaintance of many of the most distinguished scholars of the day.

Returning to France in the course of 1789, he was made a doctor at Montpellier, in the wake of his remarkable thesis entitled : Essai physiologique sur les vaisseaux lymphatiques (Physiological essay on the lymphatic vessels).

In 1791, he went to Paris, where political unrest was at its height. He joined the Girondins and then, on their elimination by the Montagnards during the Reign of Terror, he took refuge in Rouen. The events of 1792 and early 1793 had caused the whole of Europe to take up arms against France and so, on the advice of his former teacher Vicq-d’Azyr and driven by a desire to serve the Republican fatherland, he got himself sent as a surgeon to the army gathering on the borders of Italy in February 1793. He soon became one of the top army surgeons through his energy and courage, and in March 1793 was attached to the field hospital of the armée de la Méditerranée due to his knowing Italian.

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