Carl Wilhelm Heine

Carl Wilhelm Heine, later styled von Heine, was a German surgeon born in Cannstatt in 1838 who died there in 1877. He was the son of the orthopaedist Jakob Heine, who is remembered for identifying poliomyelitis as a disease. After studying medicine at Tübingen and Würzburg and taking his doctorate in 1861, he assisted his father in the family orthopaedic institution and then visited hospitals in Paris, London, Glasgow and Dublin, writing up his impressions of English hospitals for a Württemberg medical journal. He served as a military surgeon in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 and again in the Franco-Prussian War, and published a book on military surgery in 1866; both the Prussian and Austrian governments decorated him. He worked in Berlin alongside Rudolf Virchow, qualified as a professor at Heidelberg, succeeded his teacher Karl Otto Weber as director of the surgical hospital there, and in 1869 took charge of the surgical hospital at Innsbruck. From 1873 he built up a second surgical hospital in Prague as a model institution and also worked to improve the city hygiene and water supply. He became an Austrian citizen and was ennobled in 1876, was elected president of the German medical fraternity of Prague in January 1877, and died that summer at his parents home after a sudden diphtheritic throat infection.