Pierre Adolphe Piorry

Pierre Adolphe Piorry (31 December 1794 – 29 May 1879) was a French physician born in

He studied medicine in

He became a member of the Paris Medical Society on 2 March 1819, and was a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine since its inception (1820).^[1]

He later became an esteemed professor of medicine at the Charité,

René Laennec's invention of the stethoscope (1816) and his publication of De l' Auscultation Médiate (1819) inspired Piorry to make an analogous contribution to the science of medical percussion. In 1826 Piorry introduced the pleximeter (le plessimétre), a device used to help delineate internal organs, of which he described in his 1828 treatise De la Percussion Médiate.

He published works on numerous aspects of medicine, and had some success as a poet. One of his better known