Ernst Georg Ferdinand Küster

Ernst Georg Ferdinand Küster was a German surgeon, born in Wollin on 2 November 1839 and dead on 19 April 1930. He studied medicine at Bonn, Würzburg and Berlin and then worked as an assistant to Robert Ferdinand Wilms at the Bethanien Hospital in Berlin. He qualified as a lecturer in surgery in 1875, served from 1879 as chief physician and associate professor at the Augusta Hospital in Berlin, became professor of surgery at Marburg in 1890, and returned to Berlin as a surgeon in 1907. A founding member of the German Society of Surgery in 1872, he was elected its chairman in 1903. He is credited with developing the foundation of the modern radical mastoidectomy for chronic ear disease, an extension of the simple mastoidectomy introduced by Hermann Schwartze. He wrote a surgery of the kidney, ureter and adrenal glands and a history of modern German surgery. He is not the botanist Ernst Küster.