Theodor Bilharz

Theodor Bilharz (1825 to 1862) was a German physician whose discoveries helped found tropical medicine and parasitology. Born in Sigmaringen, he studied natural science and philosophy at Freiburg and took his medical degree at Tuebingen in 1849. In 1850 he followed his teacher Wilhelm Griesinger to Egypt to work at the Qasr El Eyni Hospital in Cairo, where he became the first to perform autopsies. From the autopsies of children he found several helminth parasites, and in 1851 he identified the blood fluke he named Distomum haematobium, now Schistosoma haematobium, the cause of bloody urine known in Egypt since antiquity. He also showed that the eggs, not the adult flukes, caused the disease, and he unknowingly saw a second blood fluke later identified as Schistosoma mansoni. The infection is called bilharzia or schistosomiasis in his honour. He became professor of anatomy at the Cairo medical school, caught typhoid fever or typhus on an expedition to Massawa, and died at 37.