Johann Georg Wirsung

Johann Georg Wirsung was a German anatomist born in Augsburg in 1589 who spent much of his working life in Padua, where he served for about fourteen years as prosector, the assistant who prepared and carried out dissections for the professor of anatomy. He had studied anatomy in Paris under Jean Riolan and then worked under Johannes Wesling in Padua. He is remembered for the discovery of the pancreatic duct in humans, found while dissecting a man who had recently been hanged for murder, a structure that still bears his name as the duct of Wirsung. Rather than publish the result, he engraved a sketch of the duct on a copper plate and sent printed impressions to leading anatomists across Europe, and he also described it in a letter to Riolan. The source notes that a student of Wesling, Moritz Hofmann, had observed the duct in a rooster in 1641. Wirsung was shot and killed in Padua on 22 August 1643, an attack attributed to a professional rivalry with another physician.