Plastic surgeon. Leon Ernest Sutton was born June 2, 1894 in Corning, N.Y., the son of Wilson D. and Louise Snow Sutton. He received his medical degree in 1919 from the Syracuse University College of Medicine, now SUNY Upstate Medical University. After an internship at Brooklyn Hospital he was a medical missionary in Chungking (now Chongqing), China for five years. He returned to Syracuse in the late 1920s and started a general surgical practice. By the late 1930s he had restricted his practice to plastic surgery and was for many years a professor of plastic surgery at Upstate Medical College.

Sutton was a founding member of both the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Plastic Surgery. In 1950 he served as president of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons (now the American Society of Plastic Surgeons). He married Ruth C. Farrington in 1918 with whom he had three children. Sutton died January 19, 1982 in Star Lake, New York.