Martin Benno Schmidt

Martin Benno Schmidt was a German pathologist, born in Leipzig in 1863 and living until 1949. He trained as an assistant at the University of Strasbourg under Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, became a professor of pathology at the medical academy in Düsseldorf in 1906, worked as a pathologist in Zurich and Marburg, and in 1913 took the chair of pathology at the University of Würzburg, which he held until his retirement in 1934. His research centred on bone disorders such as rickets, osteogenesis imperfecta and osteomalacia, and he also carried out studies of iron metabolism. He is remembered for describing the form of autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome now often called Schmidt's syndrome, in which the immune system attacks more than one endocrine gland. With Ludwig Aschoff he wrote a treatise on pyelonephritis, and he argued that carcinoma metastases spread through the blood.