Bernhard Bardenheuer

Bernhard Bardenheuer (12 July 1839 to 13 August 1913) was a German surgeon, with Lamersdorf given as his birthplace. He received his doctorate at Berlin in 1864, studying under Bernhard von Langenbeck, then worked at the surgical clinic of the University of Bonn under Karl Busch and in Heidelberg under the ophthalmologist Otto Becker and the surgeon Gustav Simon. During the Franco-Prussian War he served in a sick bay at a Heidelberg garrison. From 1872 he was a hospital surgeon in Cologne, where in 1875 he introduced Listerian antisepsis, and in 1884 he was given the title of professor although he was not on any university's staff. He specialized in genitourinary surgery and in 1887 performed the first complete cystectomy, on a patient with an advanced bladder tumour; the patient died two weeks later, but the operation showed that the procedure was technically workable. In 1909 he performed an autogenous bone graft of the mandible, and the Bardenheuer incision, used in the operative treatment of mastitis, carries his name.