Friedrich Fehleisen

Friedrich Fehleisen (1854 to 1924) was a German surgeon whose work focused on streptococcal bacteria. Born in Reutlingen in Wurttemberg, he died in San Francisco, California. In 1883 he became the first person to identify the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes as the cause of erysipelas, and he did so by culturing the organism from erysipelas lesions taken from human patients. A year later Rosenbach described the same organism and gave it the name Streptococcus pyogenes, and later work by Friedrich Loeffler tied it to scarlet fever. Fehleisen also appears in the early history of cancer immunotherapy. After Wilhelm Busch had inoculated a sarcoma patient with erysipelas, Fehleisen began injecting small doses of live bacteria into tumours, observed regression in many cases, and concluded that a fever had to be induced and maintained for it to work. His observations later inspired William Coley to develop Coley's toxins.