Georg Hartog Gerson

Georg Hartog Gerson (1788 to 1844) was a medical doctor and surgeon who served in the King's German Legion during the Napoleonic Wars. Born in Hamburg into a family of doctors who had practised in Hamburg and Altona since the seventeenth century, he studied at Berlin and Gottingen and took his medical doctorate in 1810. He joined the Legion as a hospital mate and in 1811 was commissioned assistant surgeon of the 5th Line Battalion, seeing action in the Peninsular War, in southern France, in the Low Countries and at Waterloo, where he dressed the wounded of his own and of neighbouring Hanoverian troops under fire and afterwards ran the military hospital in Brussels. When the Legion was dissolved in 1816 he returned to Hamburg, wrote, built a surgical practice, and from 1833 taught anatomy at the medical-surgical school and sometimes served as chief surgeon at the general hospital. His uniform jacket survives in the Museum fur Hamburgische Geschichte.