Emerich Ullmann

Emerich Ullmann was an Austrian surgeon, a native of Pécs, born in 1861. He took his doctorate in Vienna in 1884 and worked in the surgical department of Theodor Billroth. For a short time he also assisted Louis Pasteur in Paris, where he took part in research on antisera against rabies, and in 1885 he returned to the first department of surgery at the University of Vienna. He is remembered as a pioneer of research into kidney transplantation. In 1902 he performed what is reported as the first successful renal autotransplantation in a dog, in which the kidney stayed functional for five days. Soon afterwards he tried, without success, the first transplant of a kidney between species, from a goat to a dog. After an unsuccessful attempt to place a pig's kidney in a human patient with end-stage kidney disease, he stopped his kidney transplant work, although he went on to investigate tissue and other organ transplants.