Abstract
NOVEMBER 27 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the eminent German physician Prof. Wilhelm Ebstein. He was born at Jauer, in Silesia, and studied, medicine in Breslau and Berlin, where he was the pupil of Frerichs, Virchow and Romberg. After qualifying in 1859, he became physician to the All Saints Hospital at Breslau, where he did valuable work on gastric secretion and dermatology, a subject in which he always took a keen interest. He served as a medical officer in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and in 1874 was appointed professor of medicine and director of the Polyclinic at Gottingen, where he proved himself to be an indefatigable teacher, investigator and organizer, and created a model clinic well equipped with laboratories for scientific research. He was a remarkably prolific writer, as will be seen by the list of his works compiled by his son, the late medical historian Dr. Erich Ebstein (Dent. Arch. Klin. Med,, 89, 367; 1907), but he is best known for his studies on obesity, gout and diabetes. His book on diabetes and its treatment was translated into French, Danish, Swedish and Russian, and one on the nature and treatment of gout into English and French. His historical contributions included articles on the Plague of Thucydides, the English Sweat, medicine in the Bible, Linnaeus as physician, and the history of chicken-pox. He retired from his chair in 1906 at the age of seventy years, but remained in active consulting practice until a few days before his death from apoplexy on October 12, 1912.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wilhelm Ebstein. Nature 138, 914 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138914c0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138914c0
This article is cited by
-
Zur Frühdiagnose des Bronchialcarcinoms unter Berücksichtigung der Lungentuberkulose und einige Bemerkungen zur Therapie des Bronchialcarcinoms
Beiträge zur Klinik der Tuberkulose und spezifischen Tuberkulose-Forschung (1951)