Karl Gustav Himly

Karl Gustav Himly was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist from Braunschweig, born on 30 April 1772. He studied medicine at Würzburg under Carl Caspar von Siebold and at Göttingen with August Gottlieb Richter, became a professor at the hospital in Braunschweig in 1795, and in 1801 succeeded Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland as professor of medicine at Jena. From 1803 he was professor of surgery at Göttingen, and in 1809 he helped set up a new hospital there. He is credited with introducing the scientific use of mydriatics, drugs that widen the pupil, into European medicine, and he made early studies of corneal grafting. In 1802 he began the Ophthalmologische Bibliothek with Johann Adam Schmidt, the first journal in Germany devoted to eye medicine. He died in Göttingen on 22 March 1837; his son Ernst August Wilhelm Himly became a noted physiologist.