Werner Körte

Werner Körte (1853 to 1937) was a German surgeon born in Berlin, a brother of the archaeologist Gustav Körte and the philologist Alfred Körte. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in 1875 after volunteering at a typhus hospital in Metz during the Franco-Prussian War, then worked as an assistant to Robert Ferdinand Wilms at the Bethanien Hospital in Berlin, where he briefly led the hospital when Wilms fell ill. From 1889 to 1924 he directed the Krankenhaus Urban in Berlin. His surgical work centred on operations of the liver, gall bladder and pancreas, and he published on the surgery of the liver and bile passages in 1892 and on gall bladder surgery in 1905. He was the first secretary of the German Society of Surgery from 1899 until 1929 and was elected its honorary chairman in 1930.