Eduard Sonnenburg

Eduard Sonnenburg was a German surgeon, born in Bremen in 1848 and died at Bad Wildungen in 1915. After taking his medical doctorate in 1872 he worked as an assistant at the surgical clinic in Strassburg and qualified as a lecturer in surgery at the university there in 1876. He moved to Berlin in 1880, trained under Bernhard von Langenbeck and Ernst von Bergmann, became an associate professor at the University of Berlin in 1883 and was appointed director of the surgical department at the Krankenhaus Moabit in 1890. In 1886 he was a founding member of the Free Association of Berlin Surgeons, known today as the Berliner Chirurgische Gesellschaft. His name is attached to Sonnenburg's sign, bloody leukocytosis seen in appendicitis with localized peritonitis, and he standardized the appendectomy, performing it for a number of European nobles and royalty. He was the son-in-law of the neurologist Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal.