Gustav Simon (surgeon)

Gustav Simon (1824 to 1876) was a German surgeon born in Darmstadt who died in Heidelberg. He took his medical doctorate at Giessen in 1848, served as a military physician with a Hessian unit and co-founded a small hospital in Darmstadt, then became professor and director of the surgical clinic at Rostock in 1861 and succeeded Karl Otto Weber at Heidelberg in 1867. He specialized in gynecology, orthopedics and military surgery, and after observing Jobert de Lamballe in Paris he developed his own operation for vesicovaginal fistula. He showed that excretion continues in animals with one healthy kidney, and on 2 August 1869 he performed the first planned nephrectomy on a human. In 1872 he helped found the German Society of Surgery.