Carl Gussenbauer

Carl Gussenbauer was an Austrian surgeon, born on 30 October 1842 and died on 19 June 1903. A native of Obervellach, he received his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1867 and then worked as an assistant to Theodor Billroth. He later served as professor of surgery at Liège from 1875 and at Prague from 1878, and in 1894 he returned to Vienna to succeed Billroth as director of the second surgical university clinic. Gussenbauer is remembered as a pioneer of modern pancreatic surgery: in 1882 he performed the first successful operation on a pancreatic cyst using an external drainage technique he had developed, a method that stayed in wide use until the 1950s. After Billroth carried out the first successful laryngectomy in 1873, he also built an external vocal prosthesis, a reed mechanism that let the patient speak intelligibly. Several surgical eponyms carry his name, including a figure-of-eight bowel suture.