Alfred Leber

Alfred Theodor Leber (1881 to 1954) was a German ophthalmologist born in Antwerp and a nephew of the ophthalmologist Theodor Leber. He is considered the founder of German tropical ophthalmology. He trained at the Berlin Eye Clinic under Julius von Michel and in 1910 and 1911 joined an expedition to Samoa with the parasitologist Stanislaus von Prowazek, where he found the effects on the eye of filarial infection by the parasite Wuchereria bancrofti. In 1912 he worked as a senior physician at Göttingen, and in 1913 and 1914 he took part in a medical and demographic expedition to German New Guinea. Unable to return to Germany when the First World War began, he spent the war years in the Dutch East Indies as director of a hospital for eye and tropical diseases. He later worked in India, where he was interned during the Second World War, then headed ophthalmology at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Bhopal and, in 1952, became director of the Institute of Ophthalmology at Aligarh Muslim University.