Friedrich August von Ammon

Friedrich August von Ammon was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist, born in Göttingen in 1799 and dying in 1861. He was the son of the theologian Christoph Friedrich von Ammon. After studying medicine at Göttingen and Leipzig and traveling through Germany and Paris, he settled in Dresden in 1823 as a physician, focusing on surgery and surgical anatomy. He was made a professor in 1828 as director of the surgical-medical academy in Dresden and in 1837 became royal physician to King Friedrich August II of Saxony. He helped make Dresden a center of ophthalmic learning, founding the early Zeitschrift für die Ophthalmologie in 1830, and his prize-winning book De Iritide of 1835 advanced the study of iritis and sympathetic ophthalmia. He also wrote a large illustrated clinical work on diseases and developmental defects of the human eye.