Ludwig Lewin Jacobson

Ludwig Lewin Jacobson (1783 to 1843) was a Danish surgeon and comparative anatomist. Born in Copenhagen to a Jewish family, he graduated in medicine from the surgical academy in 1804 and was appointed assistant surgeon there in 1806. In 1809 he announced to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences his rediscovery of an absorptive organ in the nose, later named the Jacobsonian organ, which placed him in the front rank of the biologists of his age. He served as a military surgeon during the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 and in a field hospital near Leipzig in 1814. He invented surgical appliances, among them an apparatus for stopping arterial bleeding and a lithoclast for crushing bladder stones, and his research on the kidney portal system of birds and reptiles earned him a gold medal from the French Academy of Sciences and, in 1833, one of its Montyon prizes. Because he refused to abandon Judaism he was barred from a professorship at the University of Copenhagen.