Alfred Kast

Alfred Kast (1856 to 1903) was a German internist, born at Illenau near Achern. He studied medicine at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg and Leipzig and took his doctorate in 1879, then worked as an assistant to several leading clinicians, among them Wilhelm Heinrich Erb at Heidelberg, Julius Cohnheim at Leipzig and Christian Bäumler at Freiburg, where he also worked in the physiological chemical institute. He became an associate professor in 1886, took a directorship at Eppendorf Hospital in Hamburg in 1888, and in 1892 was named professor of internal medicine at the University of Breslau. The source credits him with an important part in bringing phenacetin and the sulphonal group of drugs into medical practice, and his name is attached to Kast syndrome, a condition treated as synonymous with Maffucci syndrome.