Carl Langenbuch

Carl Langenbuch was a German surgeon, born in 1846, who died in 1901 and is remembered as the surgeon who carried out the first successful removal of a gall bladder. He studied medicine at the University of Kiel and served as a military surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War. From 1871 he worked as an assistant to Robert Friedrich Wilms at the Bethanien Hospital in Berlin, and from 1873 until his death he was chief physician of the surgical department at the Lazarus Hospital in Berlin. On 15 July 1882 he performed a cholecystectomy on a 43-year-old man, the first such operation recorded as successful, and he published an account of the case that year. His later writings covered war wound dressings, an anatomical and surgical study of the high suprapubic approach to the bladder, echinococcus of the liver, and the surgery of the liver and gall bladder. He died in 1901 of peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix.