Rudolf Ulrich Krönlein

Rudolf Ulrich Krönlein was a Swiss surgeon, born in 1847 in Stein am Rhein and died in 1910. He studied medicine at the University of Zurich, where he was a student and assistant to the surgeon Edmund Rose, took his medical doctorate there in 1872 with a dissertation on the treatment of open wounds, and then continued his training in Berlin under Bernhard von Langenbeck. In 1874 he became director of the surgical clinic at Giessen and in 1881 was appointed professor of surgery at the University of Zurich, where Ferdinand Sauerbruch later succeeded him in the chair. In 1886 he published an account of an appendectomy he had performed in 1884 on a 17-year-old boy; the patient died two days later, but it is regarded as the first documented case of an appendectomy. He was also a pioneer of lung resections, and his name is attached to Krönlein's operation, a lateral orbitotomy that removes an orbital tumor without excising the eye, as well as to Krönlein's hernia and the Krönlein shot, a high velocity gunshot wound of the head.