Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach

Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach was a German surgeon, born in Königsberg on 1 February 1792 and died in Berlin on 11 November 1847. He first studied theology, took part as a volunteer in the wars of liberation, and then studied medicine from 1816 to 1820, learning from the anatomist Karl Ernst von Baer and the surgeon Karl Unger in Königsberg and later from Philipp Franz von Walther in Bonn. After taking his doctorate at Würzburg in 1822 and passing his state examination in Berlin in 1824, he settled there as a practising doctor and surgeon and became a professor in 1832. His career fell into two periods. The first was devoted to transplantation and plastic surgery, including the restoration of the nose and the treatment of ectropion of the eyelid. The second developed tenotomy, the cutting of tendons, which he applied to clubfoot and, from 1839 at the Charité, to the operation for squint. The Deutsche Biographie calls him one of the most gifted surgeons Germany ever produced.