Wilhelm Ebstein

Wilhelm Ebstein, who lived from 1836 to 1912, was a German physician born into a Jewish family in Jauer in Prussian Silesia, now Jawor in Poland. He studied medicine at the University of Breslau under Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs and at the University of Berlin under Rudolf Virchow and Moritz Heinrich Romberg, graduating from Berlin in 1859, the year he became a physician at the Allerheiligen Hospital in Breslau. In 1868 he became chief physician at the municipal poorhouse, and from 1874 he was a professor at the University of Göttingen, where he later directed the university hospital and dispensary. He wrote medical studies on diabetes, gout, obesity, kidney disease and dehydration. In his book Die Fettleibigkeit he recommended a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet for treating obesity, forbidding potatoes, sugar and sweets and allowing all sorts of meat. He also wrote on medicine in the Bible and the Talmud and on the illnesses of figures such as Martin Luther and Arthur Schopenhauer. Ebstein's anomaly, a rare congenital heart defect, and Pel-Ebstein fever, associated with Hodgkin's disease, are named for him. He died in Göttingen at the age of 75.