Wilhelm Busch (surgeon)

Karl David Wilhelm Busch was a German surgeon, born in Marburg on 5 January 1826 and died in Bonn on 24 November 1881 of appendicitis. His father was a professor of gynecology at Marburg. Busch studied at the University of Berlin under Johannes Peter Müller, took his doctorate in 1848 and from 1851 worked under Bernhard von Langenbeck at the Royal Surgical University Clinic in Berlin. He became an associate professor at the University of Bonn in 1855, served as consulting surgeon general to the army in 1866 and during the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1867 became director of the Bonn surgical clinic. His writings included a two-volume textbook of surgery. In 1866 and 1867 he observed that facial and neck sarcomas shrank in patients who contracted erysipelas, and he deliberately infected a young woman with a sarcoma to reproduce the effect, an early recorded step toward cancer immunotherapy.