Theodor Billroth

Theodor Billroth was a German-Austrian surgeon who held surgical posts in Berlin before becoming chair of clinical surgery at the University of Zurich and then, from 1867, professor of surgery at the University of Vienna, where he built an international reputation as one of the foremost surgeons of the nineteenth century. On 29 January 1881 he performed the first successful gastrectomy for stomach cancer, a procedure still known as the Billroth I operation, and he also carried out pioneering laryngectomies and esophagectomies, work that established him as a founding figure of modern abdominal surgery. Early in his career, in 1874, he observed the bacteriostatic effect of a Penicillium mold on bacterial growth, decades before Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin; he was also a close friend of the composer Johannes Brahms and wrote on the relationship between science and music.