Joseph Duchesne or du Chesne (Quercetan, Latin Josephus Quercetanus) (c.1544-1609) was a French physician. A follower of Paracelsus, he is now remembered for important if transitional alchemical theories.
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He was born around 1544 in Armagnac. He studied at Montpellier, and then at Basle, where he received a medical diploma in 1573. During the 1570s he married at Lyon Anne Tyre, grand-daughter of Guillaume Budé, and became a Calvinist convert. He went into medical practice and was physician to Francis, Duke of Anjou.
He left Lyon in 1580 for Kassel in Hesse, and moved on to Geneva where in 1584 he received right of citizenship. Having been elected there to the Council of Two Hundred in 1587, he undertook diplomatic missions to Bern, Basle, Schaffhausen and Zurich in the years 1589 to 1596. In 1594 he became a member of the Council of Sixty.
In 1598, following the Edict of Nantes, he returned to France and became royal physician, attending Henry IV of France. In 1601 Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery gave him a mission as envoy to the Swiss cantons. In 1604 he went to the court of Maurice of Hesse-Cassel where he gave scientific demonstrations in a laboratory set up for him.