Friedrich Küchenmeister

Gottlieb Heinrich Friedrich Küchenmeister was a German physician born in 1821 at Buchheim, now Bad Lausick, and died in Dresden in 1890. He studied medicine at Leipzig and Prague and in 1846 became a general practitioner in Zittau, moving to Dresden in 1856. He researched tapeworms, trichinosis and other parasites and published several works on them, and he edited a journal of epidemiology. In 1852 his theory that bladder worms are the juvenile stage of tapeworms drew the attention of the medical profession. In the later 1850s he tested it by feeding pork containing cysts of Taenia solium to a prisoner awaiting execution and, after the execution, recovered developing and adult tapeworms from the man's intestines. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was established that cysticercosis follows ingestion of the eggs of the pork tapeworm. He also advocated cremation and founded a Dresden association for it.