Friedrich von Esmarch

Johannes Friedrich August von Esmarch (1823 to 1908) was a German surgeon born in Tönning, Schleswig-Holstein, who studied at Kiel and Göttingen and became assistant to Bernhard von Langenbeck in 1846. His service as a surgeon in the Schleswig-Holstein wars and later in the Franco-Prussian War turned him toward military surgery and hospital management. He became director of the surgical clinic at Kiel in 1854 and professor there in 1857, and was later surgeon-general to the army. He developed the Esmarch bandage, a triangular dressing, and an apparatus that keeps a limb nearly bloodless during amputation. He founded the Deutscher Samariter-Verein, the predecessor of the Deutscher Samariter-Bund, and a first Samaritan school in Germany in 1881, and his manuals on first aid became standard texts. With the psychiatrist Peter Willers Jessen he wrote in 1857 on the link between syphilis and general paralysis of the insane.