Lorenz Böhler

Lorenz Böhler, who lived from 1885 to 1973, was an Austrian physician and surgeon born in Wolfurt and is most notable as one of the creators of modern accident surgery. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1911. During the First World War he treated shot fractures as a military surgeon, built a special department for bone fractures and joint wounds at a hospital in Bozen, and developed ideas of specialization, standardized care, statistical records and sorting of patients by injury. Back in Austria he persuaded the workers' accident insurance institution to found its own hospital, which opened in Vienna in 1925 with Böhler as head, and the Vienna accident hospital that later bore his name became an international model. His principles were to save life, save the part of the body and save its function, through fast diagnosis, painless setting of the bone, immobilization of the injured part and active movement of the others. His book Treatment of Fractures appeared in 1929, grew from 176 pages to 2,500 by 1957 and was translated into eight languages. He became a professor at the University of Vienna in 1930, published more than 400 papers, and joined the Nazi Party in 1938.