Friedrich Trendelenburg

Friedrich Trendelenburg was a German surgeon, born in Berlin on 24 May 1844 and died on 15 December 1924. He came from a scholarly family: his father was the philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, and his sons included the pharmacologist Paul Trendelenburg and the physiologist Wilhelm Trendelenburg. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh, completed his studies at the Charité in Berlin under Bernhard von Langenbeck and received his doctorate in 1866. He practised at the University of Rostock and the University of Bonn, and in 1895 became surgeon-in-chief at the University of Leipzig. He founded the German Surgical Society in 1872 and was interested in the history of surgery and in the surgical removal of pulmonary emboli. His student Martin Kirschner performed the first successful pulmonary embolectomy in 1924.