Michael Anton Biermer

Michael Anton Biermer (1827 to 1892) was a German internist, a native of Bamberg. He earned his doctorate at the University of Würzburg in 1851, where he studied under Rudolf Virchow, and later held professorships at Bern from 1861, Zurich from 1867 and Breslau from 1874 to 1891. Among his better known students were the surgeon Theodor Kocher in Zurich and the dermatologist Albert Neisser in Breslau. In 1860 he was the first to describe a patient with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a five year old girl named Maria Speyer. In 1872 he described a disorder he called progressive pernicious anemia, naming it for its insidious course and because it was then considered untreatable. Thomas Addison had described the same disease in 1849, but Biermer's account was much more comprehensive, and the condition has also been called Addison-Biermer disease. His name is also attached to Biermer's change of note, a percussion phenomenon.