Maximilian Joseph von Chelius

Maximilian Joseph von Chelius was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist, born in Mannheim on 16 January 1794. He took his medical doctorate at Heidelberg in 1812 and worked as a civilian and military physician in Munich, serving as an army surgeon in the last phase of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 and 1815. In 1817 he became an associate professor of surgery at Heidelberg and by 1819 a full professor, and he is regarded as the founder of the surgical tradition of its medical faculty. He specialized in ophthalmic surgery and wrote manuals of surgery and of ophthalmology, as well as studies of staphyloma and of the cornea. Among his patients was the composer Frédéric Chopin, whom he treated for sepsis of a finger. He lived from 1830 until his death on 17 August 1876 in the Heidelberg house that is now the Kurpfälzisches Museum.