Friedrich Fülleborn

Friedrich Fülleborn (1866 to 1933) was a German physician who specialised in tropical medicine and parasitology. A native of Kulm in West Prussia, now Chełmno in Poland, he studied medicine and natural sciences in Berlin and from 1896 served as a military physician with the Schutztruppe in German East Africa, taking part in the 1898 to 1900 expedition to the south of the colony. In 1901 he became director of the Department of Tropical Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the Hamburg Institute for Marine and Tropical Diseases, and in 1930 he succeeded Bernhard Nocht as director of the institute, a post he held until his death. He led the Hamburg South Seas Expedition from 1908 and is best known for his research on filarial worms. Working with dogs in Hamburg he described autoinfection and traced the migratory route of the parasite Strongyloides stercoralis before it reaches the intestine, and Fülleborn's method for examining parasite eggs in faeces bears his name.