Hugo Magnus

Hugo Magnus (1842 to 1907) was a German ophthalmologist and historian of medicine. Born in Neumarkt in Silesia, he studied medicine at the University of Breslau, where he was taught by Albrecht Theodor Middeldorpf and Hermann Lebert, took his medical doctorate in 1867, qualified as a lecturer in ophthalmology in 1873 and became an associate professor there in 1883. He is remembered chiefly for his intensive studies of colour blindness and the colour sense. His research on eye disease also produced an early observation in 1874 of what was later known as Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome and an early clinical description in 1878 of proptosis in infantile scurvy. He wrote many works on the history of medicine, among them studies of the eye in Greek and Roman anatomy, ophthalmology of the ancients, folk medicine and superstition in medicine, some later translated into English. He died in Breslau.