Werner Zoege von Manteuffel

Werner Maximilian Friedrich Zoege von Manteuffel was a Baltic German surgeon, born at Määri in Estonia on 13 July 1857 and dying in Tallinn on 14 March 1926. He studied at the Imperial University of Dorpat, now Tartu, and became a doctor in 1886. He is described as the earliest advocate of sterilised gloves: in an article of 1897 he recommended that surgeons wear rubber gloves and boil them in water before use, at a time when most doctors operated with bare hands or wore gloves of cotton, leather or other absorbent materials. He served as personal physician to the Russian Emperor Nicholas II and in that post treated the Tsar's son Alexei for several years for a hereditary bleeding disorder, hemophilia B. From 1908 he ran a private clinic in Riga, and in 1918 he moved to Reval, today Tallinn, where he became dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Dorpat. During the Estonian War of Independence he served as a volunteer military doctor in the Tallinn Hospital. His maternal grandfather was the naturalist, explorer and mountaineer Friedrich Parrot.