Wilhelm Roser

Wilhelm Roser (1817 to 1888) was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist, born in Stuttgart and died in Marburg. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Tübingen in 1839, continued his education in Würzburg, Halle, Vienna and Paris, and was habilitated for surgery at Tübingen in 1841. After practising medicine in Reutlingen from 1846 he succeeded Eduard Zeis as professor of surgery at the University of Marburg, where he remained for the rest of his career. With his lifelong friends, the clinician Carl Wunderlich and the neurologist Wilhelm Griesinger, he founded the Archiv für physiologische Heilkunde, a journal of physiological medicine. He published more than 150 medical papers and wrote the Handbuch der anatomischen Chirurgie, a textbook of anatomical surgery that ran through eight editions and was translated into French and English. His name is attached to the Roser-König mouth gag and to the Roser-Nélaton line, a theoretical line drawn from the anterior superior iliac spine to the tuberosity of the ischium.