Carl Jakob Adolf Christian Gerhardt

Carl Jakob Adolf Christian Gerhardt (1833 to 1902) was a German internist born in Speyer. He studied medicine at Wuerzburg, qualified in 1856 and worked under Heinrich von Bamberger, Franz von Rinecker and Wilhelm Griesinger before being appointed professor of medicine and head of internal medicine at Jena in 1861. He returned to Wuerzburg in 1872 and in 1885 succeeded Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs at the Charite in Berlin, where he founded the second internal medicine clinic and had Paul Ehrlich as an assistant. He edited the influential Handbuch der Kinderkrankheiten, researched auscultation and percussion, and used iron chloride to detect acetone in diabetes. In 1892 he gave an early description of erythromelalgia, once called Gerhardt's disease.