His successful test on a dog who survived without his lungs collapsing led Dr. Perhaps stimulated by his father’s death from tuberculosis, he began to work on a method to open the thoracic cavity without the lungs collapsing, the so-called negative pressure chamber from which air was led outward to reach a pressure of -10 mmHg. It was there that he worked under the German-named Polish surgeon Johann Freiherr von Mikulicz-Radecki. Impressed with his scientific work, Professor Langerhans arranged for him to secure a voluntary position in surgery in Breslau, now Wroclaw in Poland.
He subsequently worked as a voluntary physician assistant in pathology and anatomy in the poor neighborhood of Moabit in Berlin. He was fired after taking a patient for an emergency surgery on Sunday, disturbing the religious service of the Protestant Deaconess hospital of Kassel and calling for help in the OR. He attended the gymnasium, or secondary school, taking a year in natural sciences at the University of Marburg and then graduating from the medical school as a family physician. In his early studies, Ferdinand was supported by the earnings of his grandfather, mother, and aunt, who early on recognized his talent. He had to move with his mother from Barmen (Wüppertal) to Elberfeld (near Erfurt), where his grandfather Hammerschmidt had a shop as an artisan shoemaker for wealthy ladies.
When Ferdinand was only two years old, his father, a manager of a fabric manufacturing company, died of tuberculosis. It was an example of how a young man starting life in an ordinary nonmedical family overcame obstacle after obstacle to achieve extraordinary heights of inventiveness and competence.
Three years after his death in 1954, his life was detailed in a movie authored by ghostwriter Hans Rudolf Berndorff (1895-1963) and titled Das war mein Leben, ( This was my life). Sourceįerdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) was one of the most important thoracic surgeons of the first half of the twentieth century, remembered for pioneering a method that would allow access to the thoracic cavity and the heart. Ferdinand Sauerbruch, father of thoracic surgery March 11, 2020įerndinand Sauerbruch at a medical lecture at the University of Zurich, between 19.
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