Karl Wilhelm Ernst Joachim Schönborn

Karl Wilhelm Ernst Joachim Schönborn was a German surgeon, a native of Breslau, born in 1840 and died in 1906. He studied medicine at Breslau, Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin and took his medical doctorate in 1863. In Berlin he assisted Robert Ferdinand Wilms at Bethanien Hospital and Bernhard von Langenbeck at the university hospital. In 1871 he became a professor at the university surgical clinic in Königsberg, and from 1886 until his death he was professor of surgery at the University of Würzburg. He is remembered for his work on velopharyngeal insufficiency, the condition associated with cleft palate. In 1875 he described the first true pharyngeal flap operation, an inferiorly based flap, performed several of these operations in the following years, and in 1886 switched to a superiorly based flap. He described the procedures in Ueber eine neue Methode der Staphylorrhaphie (1875) and Vorstellung eines Falles von Staphyloplastik (1886).