Ottomar Rosenbach

Ottomar Rosenbach was a German physician and internist, born on 4 January 1851 in Krappitz in Silesia and died on 20 March 1907 in Berlin. He studied medicine at Breslau and Berlin, took his doctorate at Breslau in 1873, worked for four years as an assistant at Jena under Wilhelm Leube and Hermann Nothnagel, and qualified as a university teacher at Breslau in 1878 with work on artificially produced heart valve defects. From 1887 he was chief physician of the Allerheiligen Hospital in Breslau, left it in 1893, and in 1896 gave up his academic post and moved to Berlin to work as a physician and private scholar. Starting from studies of heart disease he brought a functional view of disease into medicine, developed a functional diagnostics using laboratory methods, and was often criticised for resisting the claim of bacteriology to explain disease by a single cause.