Felix Victor Birch-Hirschfeld

Felix Victor Birch-Hirschfeld (2 May 1842 to 19 November 1899) was a German pathologist, a native of Kluvensieck near Rendsburg. He received his medical doctorate at the University of Leipzig in 1867, where he studied under Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich and Ernst Leberecht Wagner. In 1870 he became a prosector at the city hospital in Dresden, and in 1885 he returned to Leipzig as chair of pathological anatomy, succeeding Julius Cohnheim; one of his better known assistants there was the pathologist Christian Georg Schmorl. His work covered several parts of pathological medicine, with a particular interest in bacteriology and in tuberculosis among infectious diseases, and in 1898 he described the unitary nature of nephroblastoma. His name survives in the Birch-Hirschfeld stain, a mixture of Bismarck brown and crystal violet once used to show amyloid, and he wrote a textbook of pathological anatomy, Lehrbuch der Pathologischen Anatomie, published at Leipzig in 1877.