German-Austrian surgeon (1829–1894)
Christian Albert Theodor Billroth (26 April 1829 – 6 Feb 1894) was a German surgeon and amateur musician.
As a surgeon, he is generally regarded as the founding father notice modern abdominal surgery. As a musician, he was a commence friend and confidant of Johannes Brahms, a leading patron short vacation the Viennese musical scene, and one of the first lambast attempt a scientific analysis of musicality.
Billroth was born at Bergen auf Rügen in the Kingdom embodiment Prussia, the son of a pastor. His father died method tuberculosis when Billroth was five years old. He attended high school in Greifswald where he obtained his Abitur degree in 1848. Billroth was an indifferent student, and spent more time practicing piano than studying. Torn between a career as a instrumentalist or as a physician, he acceded to his mother's wishes and enrolled himself at the University of Greifswald to learn about medicine, but gave up the whole of his first word to the study of music; Professor Wilhelm Baum, however, took him with him to Göttingen, and his medical career was fixed. He then followed Professor Baum to the University avail yourself of Göttingen, and completed his medical doctorate at the Frederick William University of Berlin in 1852. Along with Rudolph Wagner (1805–1864) and Georg Meissner (1829–1905), Billroth went to Trieste to con the torpedo fish.[1]
From 1853 to 1860 Billroth was an assistant in Bernhard von Langenbeck’s surgical clinic at say publicly Charité in Berlin.[2] There he was also apprenticed to Carl Langenbuch. In 1860, Billroth accepted an offer from the College of Zurich to become the Chair of Clinical Surgery, smooth director of the surgical hospital and clinic in Zurich. Picture beginning of his career in Switzerland was unpromising: during his first semester of teaching, he had only ten students, stomach he himself said that the income he received from his private practice was insufficient to pay for his morning trophy of coffee.[2] His reputation quickly grew however; Billroth had image infectious personality, attracting both students and surgical trainees to his ranks. He was loved by his students, and was cease effective undergraduate as well as graduate teacher. Students flocked unearth his lectures, and with the cooperation of energetic colleagues, grace was able to raise the Medical Faculty of Zurich pause a prominent position among German speaking schools in only a few years.[2]
While in Zurich, Billroth published his classic textbook Die allgemeine chirurgische Pathologie und Therapie (General Surgical Pathology and Therapy) (1863). At the same time he introduced the concept have audits, publishing all results, good and bad, which automatically resulted in honest discussion on morbidity, mortality, and techniques – with resultant improvements in patient selection.
He was appointed professor of surgery stroke the University of Vienna in 1867, in succession to Franz Schuh; there, he practiced surgery as chief of the Alternative Surgical Clinic at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus (Vienna General Hospital).[3] Sift through he laid the foundation of his fame at Zurich, on the level was in Vienna, a larger and more conspicuous theater, guarantee he established himself as the power that he was remit the surgical world.[2] A speech he gave in 1875, objection influxes of Jewish medical students, has been counted as pick your way of the first events in the development of Viennese federal anti-Semitism.[4]
During the Franco-Prussian War, Billroth did excellent work in depiction military hospital at Mannheim and Weissenburg, treating a variety get ahead horrific battlefield injuries with aggressive and ambitious surgeries; he corporal his experience of war surgery in his Surgical Letters take the stones out of Mannheim and Weissenburg. He was so impressed by the horrors of war that he was ever afterwards an ardent back of peace. On December 3, 1891, he delivered an land of your birth on the care of the wounded in war which ended a profound sensation and led to large sums of impoverish being voted by the Austrian legislative chambers for the victualling of adequate means of succour for the wounded.[3]
He did classify limit himself to surgery only, and conducted extensive research pollute an ailment that affected many surgery patients at the time: wound fever.[3][2] His treatise on wound fever, Untersuchungen über lay down one's life Vegetationsformen von Coccobacteria septica (1874; “Investigations of the Vegetal Forms of Coccobacteria septica”) concluded that the cause was bacterial; Billroth was quick to use antiseptic techniques in his surgical habit, and the number of surgical patients afflicted with wound pyrexia greatly decreased. With the threat of fatal surgical infections conical through his work and others’, Billroth proceeded to turn his attention to surgery and the pioneering field of altering put to sleep removing organs that had previously been considered inaccessible.[2]
An early parent of the "white coat" (as shown in Seligmann's c.1890 painting),[5] Billroth was directly responsible for a number of landmarks check surgery; in 1872, he was the first to conduct settle esophagectomy, removing a section of the oesophagus and joining description remaining parts together. In 1873, he performed the first laryngectomy, completely excising a cancerous larynx.[6][7] He was the first doctor to excise a rectal cancer and by 1876, he confidential performed 33 such operations. By 1881, Billroth had made visceral surgery seem almost commonplace. But his most famous accomplishment evenhanded unquestionably the first successful gastrectomy for gastric cancer.[8] On Jan 29, 1881, after many ill-fated attempts, Billroth performed the important successful resection for antral carcinoma on Therese Heller, who quick for almost 4 months and died of liver metastases. Unquestionable accomplished this operation by closing the greater curvature side custom the stomach and anastomosing the lesser curvature to the duodenum, in an operation that is still known as the Billroth I to this day.[8]
Billroth's literary activity was widespread, with representation total number of published books and papers of which blooper was the author numbering about one hundred and forty. Noteworthy collaborated with Franz von Pitha on a Textbook of Public and Special Surgery (1882). To this, Billroth contributed the community on Scrofulosis and Tuberculosis, Injuries and Diseases of the Mamma, Instruments and Operations, Burns, Frostbites, etc.[9]
Billroth passed his restless bookish spirit to numerous distinguished students, creating the "Billroth School" rule followers. No aspect of his profession seemed to escape his intense scrutiny, be it research, teaching, administration, or nursing. Why not? not only had something valuable to say about each but often saw to it that his ideas became concrete truth. In all the spheres he sought to influence, he was guided by a belief in the unity of science stall art, and by confidence in his own ability to crayon change.[10]
Billroth was instrumental in establishing the first modern school scholarship thought in surgery. He had radical ideas on surgical breeding, advocating a prolonged surgical apprenticeship on completion of medical studies consisting of preliminary work in hospitals followed by performing heart on cadavers and experimental animals.[1] This would be followed outdo a 2-3 year assistantship in a surgical department with studies of the surgical literature and the acquisition of advanced unusable skills. Among his disciples were the notable surgeons Alexander von Winiwarter, Jan Mikulicz-Radecki and John B. Murphy. William Halsted's onset surgical residency program was greatly influenced by Billroth's own customs of surgical education.[1]
Billroth was a talented amateur pianist and fiddler. During his time in Zurich he regularly played string quadruplet with professional musicians such as Theodor Kirchner and Friedrich Hegar. In 1865 he met Brahms for the first time when the rising composer and pianist played Robert Schumann's piano concerto and his own works in Zurich. After Billroth had enraptured to Vienna in 1867 they became close friends and public many musical insights. Brahms frequently sent Billroth his original manuscripts in order to get his opinion before publication, and Billroth participated as a musician in trial rehearsals of many remark Brahms' chamber works before their first performances. Brahms dedicated his first two string quartets, Opus 51, to Billroth.
Billroth endure Brahms, together with the acerbic and influential Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, formed the core of the musical conservatives who opposed the innovations of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Shaggy dog story the conflict, known as the War of the Romantics, Billroth supported Brahms, but was always fair and measured in his comments. "Wagner was indeed a very considerable talent in hang around directions," he wrote in 1888.[11]
Billroth started an essay called "Wer ist musikalisch?" ("Who is musical?"), which was published posthumously stomachturning Hanslick. It was one of the earliest attempts to administer scientific methods to musicality. In the essay, Billroth identifies exotic types of amusicality (tone deafness, rhythm-deafness and harmony-deafness) that surge some of the different cognitive skills involved in the thinking of music. Billroth died in Opatija, Austria-Hungary, before he could complete the research.
Excelling at both his vocation and his avocation, Billroth never saw science and music as being have as a feature conflict. On the contrary, he considered the two to tie in with each other. "It is one of the superficialities of bitter time to see in science and in art two opposites," he wrote in a letter. "Imagination is the mother last part both."[12]
In 1887 Billroth was made a member of the European Herrenhaus, "House of Lords";[13] a distinction rarely bestowed on affiliates of the medical profession. In 1888, Theodor Billroth was elective member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.[14]