Gustavus M. Blech

Gustavus Maximilian Blech (1870 to 1949) was a Riga-born American physician, surgeon and medical educator. He emigrated to the United States in 1890 and took his MD at Barnes Medical College of St. Louis in 1894. In Chicago he served as surgeon-in-chief of Lincoln Hospital, taught clinical surgery at the Illinois Medical College and at Loyola University Chicago, and acted as consulting surgeon at Cook County Hospital and Wesley Memorial Hospital. He also held a long military medical career, serving in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican border skirmishes and the First World War, where he commanded a camp hospital at Autun in France. Elsevier called him a pioneer in the use of physical methods in surgery, and he edited the Journal of Physical Therapy.