Johann Christian Jüngken

Johann Christian Jüngken was a German ophthalmologist and surgeon, born at Burg bei Magdeburg in 1794 and died in Hanover in 1875. He studied medicine and natural sciences at Göttingen under Conrad Johann Martin Langenbeck and Karl Gustav Himly, served as a volunteer hospital assistant in Berlin and Brussels in 1815, where he gained experience treating battle wounds and saw soldiers with the disease then called Egyptian ophthalmia, and continued at Berlin, where he assisted Karl Ferdinand von Graefe in ophthalmology. He became an associate professor in 1825. In 1828 he was appointed director of the newly formed ophthalmology department at the Charité in Berlin, a post he kept for forty years, and in 1834 he became full professor of surgery and ophthalmology and was called to Brussels to investigate an outbreak of ophthalmia in the Belgian army. After Johann Nepomuk Rust died in 1841 he also directed surgery at the Charité. He was among the first physicians to use chloroform in eye surgery.