Edgar von Gierke

Edgar Otto Conrad von Gierke (1877 to 1945) was a German pathologist born in Breslau, in the Prussian province of Silesia, and the son of the legal scholar Otto von Gierke. He took his medical doctorate at Heidelberg in 1901, lectured at Freiburg from 1904 and from 1908 directed the Pathological-Bacteriological Institute of the Karlsruhe municipal hospitals for nearly thirty years, while also serving as an associate professor of bacteriology at the Technische Hochschule there. He wrote the handbook Taschenbuch der pathologischen Anatomie. In 1929 he published the article describing, from the autopsy of an affected child, a glycogen storage disease of the liver and kidneys, which he first called Hepato-Nephromegalia glykogenica; it is now known as glycogen storage disease type I and long carried his name as von Gierke disease. Treated as Jewish under Nazi racial laws, he was forced into retirement in 1937 and again in 1940, and he died in Karlsruhe in 1945.