Eduard Zeis

Eduard Zeis (1807 to 1868) was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist, born in Dresden. He studied medicine at the universities of Leipzig, Bonn and Munich and took his doctorate at Leipzig in 1832. After opening a general practice in his home city he became professor of surgery at Marburg in 1844, and in 1850 he returned to Dresden as senior medical officer of the newly founded city hospital in Friedrichstadt. In 1838 he published the first textbook of plastic surgery, the Handbuch der plastischen Chirurgie, and in doing so established the term plastic surgery in its German form; the foreword was written by the surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach and the work was later translated into English. In the same year he also published a study of the dreams of the blind. His name survives in anatomy and ophthalmology through the glands of Zeis, the sebaceous glands that open into the follicles of the eyelashes, and through the Zeisian sty, the inflammation of one of those glands.