Anton de Haen

Anton de Haen (8 December 1704 to 5 September 1776) was a Dutch physician born in The Hague who made his career in Vienna. He studied medicine at Leiden under Hermann Boerhaave and in 1754 moved to the University of Vienna, where he became professor and head of its medical clinic, and he is credited with founding the Viennese school of medicine. He worked beside Gerard van Swieten in setting up structured medical teaching, and he is remembered for teaching students at the bedside. De Haen urged post-mortem investigation and careful case histories, and he was among the first physicians to use the thermometer routinely, recognising body temperature as a valuable sign of health and illness. His treatise Ratio medendi in nosocomio practico discusses eighteenth-century Viennese hospital practice and its case histories, and it records one of the earliest known cases of amenorrhea linked to a pituitary tumour.