Jacob Moritz Blumberg

Jacob Moritz Blumberg (1873 to 1955) was a German Jewish surgeon and gynaecologist, born in the Province of Posen and educated at Breslau, where he took his doctorate in 1896. He trained under the surgeon Jan Mikulicz-Radecki, the dermatologist Albert Neisser, Albert Fraenkel and Paul Zweifel, then began practice in Berlin. Early in his career he described Blumberg's sign, used to indicate peritonitis, and he developed a type of rubber glove for surgeons that colleagues widely adopted. In the First World War he served in the German army and halted a typhus epidemic in a prisoner of war camp by delousing thousands of prisoners. Afterwards he organised prenatal clinics in Berlin and founded an X-ray and radium institute. He left Germany as the Nazi Party rose and continued his work in London.