Frédéric Jules Sichel

Frédéric Jules Sichel (1802 to 1868) was a German-born physician who made his career in Paris and is remembered as one of the men who brought modern ophthalmology to France. Born in Frankfurt am Main, he studied medicine at Würzburg, Tübingen and Berlin, then worked from 1825 to 1829 as an assistant to the ophthalmologist Friedrich Jäger von Jaxtthal in Vienna. He settled in Paris in 1829, took his doctorate there in 1833 with a thesis on ophthalmology and on rheumatic inflammation of the eye, and became a French citizen the same year. In 1832 he opened the first ophthalmic clinic in Paris, where he taught and trained several physicians who later became well known eye specialists, among them Louis-Auguste Desmarres and Wiktor Szokalski. He also gave courses at the Hôpital Saint-Antoine. Outside medicine he studied oriental languages and archaeology, writing at length on the seals of Roman oculists, and as an entomologist he specialized in Hymenoptera, leaving a collection that went to the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.