Karl Otto Weber

Karl Otto Weber was a German surgeon and pathologist, born in Frankfurt am Main on 29 December 1827 and died in Heidelberg of diphtheria on 11 June 1867 at the age of thirty-nine. He received his doctorate in medicine and surgery from Bonn in 1851, after first studying botany, geology and mineralogy there, and worked as an assistant in the Bonn surgery clinic under Karl Wilhelm Wutzer. Because the faculty wanted pathological anatomy represented among its specialties, he devoted himself to it, becoming extraordinary professor in 1857 and ordinary professor in 1862. In 1865 he became professor of surgery at the University of Heidelberg, where he took an active part in building the hospital at Heidelberg-Bergheim. As a pathological anatomist he specialised in histology and histogenesis. He wrote Die Knochengeschwülste in anatomischer und praktischer Beziehung (1856) and Chirurgische Erfahrungen und Untersuchungen (1859), contributed to Pitha and Billroth's handbook of surgery, and published essays on history and biography, among them pieces on Johannes Müller and Alexander von Humboldt.