Heinrich Quincke

Heinrich Irenaeus Quincke (1842 to 1922) was a German internist and surgeon whose main contribution to internal medicine was introducing the lumbar puncture for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Born in Frankfurt an der Oder, the son of the physician Hermann Quincke, he received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1863 and worked in Vienna and at the Charite in Berlin before becoming professor of internal medicine at Bern in 1873 and at Kiel in 1878. After 1874 his main research area was pulmonary medicine. He is credited as perhaps the first, in 1882, to recognize angioedema, and he described what is now called idiopathic intracranial hypertension in 1893. Several signs carry his name, including Quincke pulse in aortic insufficiency.