Ernst von Leyden

Ernst Viktor von Leyden was a German internist, born in Danzig in 1832 and died in Berlin in 1910. He trained at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Institut in Berlin as a pupil of Johann Lukas Schönlein and Ludwig Traube, and later taught medicine at the universities of Königsberg, Strasbourg and Berlin, where students and assistants such as Hermann Nothnagel and Hermann Ludwig Eichhorst worked under him. With Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs he founded the Zeitschrift für klinische Medizin in 1880 and in 1881 he founded the Gesellschaft für innere Medizin. He treated Frederick III, German Emperor, for cancer of the larynx without success, and from 1894 served as a physician to Tsar Alexander III of Russia. He specialised in neurological diseases, helped establish proper hospital facilities for tuberculosis patients, wrote the two-volume Handbuch der Ernährungstherapie, and initiated the first international cancer conference in Heidelberg in 1906 and the first international association for cancer research in Berlin in 1908. Several eponymous terms, including Charcot-Leyden crystals, carry his name.