Wilhelm Baum (surgeon)

Wilhelm Baum, born in Elbing in 1799 and died in 1883, was a German surgeon. He studied medicine at Königsberg, Göttingen and Berlin and took his doctorate in 1822, spent a year as surgical assistant to Karl Ferdinand von Graefe in Berlin, and then studied for several years in Austria, Italy, France and the British Isles, attending lectures and clinics in Paris by Guillaume Dupuytren, Dominique Jean Larrey and Jean Cruveilhier. After practising in Berlin he became chief surgeon at the municipal hospital in Danzig, where he distinguished himself in the cholera epidemic of 1831. In 1841 he went to Paris to study lithotripsy, and in 1842 he became professor of surgery at the University of Greifswald, later holding the same chair at Göttingen. He was one of the first surgeons in Germany to perform tracheotomy for croup, with five cases at Greifswald in 1848, and he gave an early mention of human pulmonary aspergillosis. A good teacher who wrote little, he was an important influence on the career of Theodor Billroth.