August Gottlieb Richter

August Gottlieb Richter (1742 to 1812) was a German surgeon and physician whom the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie calls the most famous German surgeon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Born at Zörbig in Saxony into a family of pastors, he studied medicine at Göttingen from 1760, took his doctorate in 1764 and then travelled to Strasbourg, Paris, London, Oxford and Leiden, where he met the surgeons J. L. Petit and Percivall Pott. He returned to Göttingen in 1766 as associate professor and became full professor in 1771. With the help of his Masonic lodge he founded the academic hospital there in 1780 and directed it until 1797. He edited the fifteen volumes of his Chirurgische Bibliothek, wrote a treatise on hernias and a seven volume textbook of surgery, and worked on the technique of cataract operations. He is credited with raising German surgery from a handicraft to a university science joined to medicine, and with simplifying the surgical instrument set. He died at Göttingen in 1812.