Morris Simmonds

Morris Simmonds was a German physician and pathologist, born in 1855 in St. Thomas, then part of the Danish West Indies, and dying in Hamburg in 1925. His family emigrated to Hamburg in 1861. He took his doctorate at the University of Kiel in 1879, where he assisted Arnold Ludwig Gotthilf Heller and Friedrich von Esmarch, and from 1889 he worked as a prosector at St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg. He became a professor in 1909 and an honorary professor at the newly founded University of Hamburg in 1919. His special field of interest was the endocrine glands, and his name is attached to Simmonds' disease, a form of hypopituitarism in which all pituitary secretions are lacking. In 1914 he was the first to describe its clinical features, linked to destruction of the anterior lobe of the pituitary.