Karl von Hecker

Karl Hecker (1827 to 1882) was a German gynecologist and obstetrician, born in Berlin as the only son of the medical historian Justus Hecker. He studied medicine at Berlin, Heidelberg, Paris and Vienna and received his doctorate at Berlin in 1848. From 1851 he was an assistant at the Charite obstetrics clinic under Dietrich Wilhelm Heinrich Busch, and he qualified as a university lecturer in 1853 with a thesis on the retroverted pregnant uterus. He became associate professor of obstetrics at Marburg in 1858 and then gynecologist at the University of Munich, where he also directed the municipal maternity hospital and school for midwives and served as university rector in 1874 and 1875. In 1877 he began working with Carl Credé and Alfred Hegar toward an independent gynecological society, founded in 1885, three years after his death.