Heinrich Curschmann

Heinrich Curschmann (1846 to 1910) was a German internist, a native of Giessen. He studied medicine at the University of Giessen from 1863 to 1868 and then worked as an assistant physician at the Rochusspital in Mainz. He qualified as a university lecturer in internal medicine at the University of Berlin in 1875, directed the state hospital in Hamburg from 1879 to 1888, and from 1888 to 1910 was professor of internal medicine at the University of Leipzig, serving as academic rector in 1906 and 1907. He is remembered for Klinische Abbildungen (Clinical Illustrations, 1894), a collection of photographs of changes to the outer form of the body caused by internal disease, regarded as a pioneering work of medical photography. His treatise on typhoid and typhus fever appeared in English in 1901. Several medical terms carry his name, among them Curschmann's disease, Curschmann's cannula and Curschmann's spirals, the coiled mucinous fibrils sometimes found in the sputum in bronchial asthma.