Christian Georg Schmorl

Christian Georg Schmorl was a German pathologist born in Mügeln in the Kingdom of Saxony in 1861. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, where he qualified as a university lecturer in forensic medicine in 1892 and worked as an assistant to the pathologist Felix Victor Birch-Hirschfeld until 1894. From 1894 to 1931 he was attached to the city hospital in Dresden-Friedrichstadt. He is remembered for his work in histology and his studies of the human skeleton. He devised a histological stain designed to show the fine canaliculi and lamellae in sections of bone, and he described protrusions of intervertebral disc material into the vertebral body, which are now known as Schmorl's nodes. In 1904 he coined the term kernicterus for nuclear jaundice of the basal ganglia, a condition that the pathologist Johannes Orth had identified earlier. Shortly before his death in 1932 he published a book on the healthy and the diseased spine, and he died of sepsis from an infected finger that he nicked while dissecting a spine.