Max Wilms

Max Wilms (1867 to 1918) was a German surgeon and university teacher, born in Geilenkirchen-Hünshoven and died in Heidelberg. His father wanted him to study law, but after one semester he turned to medicine, studied in Munich, Marburg, Berlin and Bonn, and took his doctorate in Bonn in 1890 with a work on removal of the oesophagus. He then worked in pathological anatomy and published an influential writing on mixed tumours, devised a simple mercury manometer for measuring pressure in the spinal canal, and qualified as a lecturer in 1899 with a thesis on ileus. He became an associate professor in Leipzig in 1904, was called to a chair in Basel in 1907 and held the surgery chair at Heidelberg from 1910 until his death. His clinical research centred on X-ray diagnosis and radiation treatment of tumours and tuberculosis, and he wrote a surgery textbook with Ludwig Wullstein that ran to seven editions. The Wilms tumour, a malignant mixed tumour of the kidney in children, bears his name. He died of diphtheria caught while treating a French prisoner of war.