Georg Kelling

Georg Kelling (7 July 1866 - 14 February 1945) was a German internist and surgeon recognized as a pioneer of laparoscopy. He studied medicine at Leipzig and Berlin, earned his medical doctorate in 1890, and worked as a physician at a city hospital in Dresden, where he also developed an esophagoscope. In 1901 he performed the first laparoscopic surgery, inserting a cystoscope into a dog's abdomen after inflating it with filtered air through a trocar to create a pneumoperitoneum, a technique he called celioscopy. Kelling and his wife were killed in the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945.