Theodor Billroth
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| Christian Albert Theodor Billroth | |
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 Portrait of Billroth from Scientific American |
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| Born | August 26, 1829 Bergen auf Rügen,Kingdom of Prussia |
| Died | February 6, 1894 (aged 64) Opatija, Austria-Hungary |
| Profession | Surgeon |
| Institutions | Allgemeine Krankenhaus University of Vienna |
| Specialism | abdominal surgery |
| Known for | Being the founding father of modern abdominal surgery First successful gastrectomy for gastric cancer applying scientific methods to musicality |
Christian Albert Theodor Billroth (26 August 1829 at Bergen auf Rügen in the Kingdom of Prussia. – 6 February 1894) was a German-born Austrian surgeon and amateur musician.
As a surgeon, he is generally regarded as the founding father of modern abdominal surgery. As a musician, he was a close friend and confidante of Johannes Brahms, a leading patron of the Viennese musical scene, and one of the first to attempt a scientific analysis of musicality.
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[edit] Surgery
Billroth worked as a doctor from 1853-1860 at the Charité. He was apprenticed to Carl Langenbuch and practiced surgery at Vienna, as chief of the Second Surgical Clinic at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus (Vienna General Hospital) and professor of surgery at the University of Vienna.
He was directly responsible for a number of landmarks in surgery, including the first esophagectomy (1871), the first laryngectomy (1873), and most famously, the first successful gastrectomy (1881) for gastric cancer, after many ill-fated attempts. Legend has it that Billroth was nearly stoned to death in the streets of Vienna when his first gastrectomy patient died after the procedure.
Billroth was also instrumental in establishing the first modern school of thought in surgery. Among his disciples were luminaries such as Alexander von Winiwarter, Jan Mikulicz-Radecki and John B. Murphy. William Halsted's pioneer surgical residency program was greatly influenced by Billroth's own methods of surgical education.
[edit] Music
Billroth was a talented amateur pianist and violinist. He met Brahms in the 1860's, when the composer was a rising star of the Viennese musical scene. They became close friends and shared musical insights. Brahms frequently sent Billroth his original manuscripts in order to get his opinion before publication, and Billroth participated as a musician in trial rehearsals of many of Brahms' chamber works before their first performances. Brahms dedicated his first two string quartets, Opus 51, to Billroth.
Billroth and Brahms, together with the acerbic and influential Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, formed the core of the musical conservatives who opposed the innovations of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. In the conflict, known as the War of the Romantics, Billroth supported Brahms, but was always fair and measured in his comments. "Wagner was indeed a very considerable talent in many directions," he wrote in 1888[1].
Billroth started an essay called Wer ist musikalisch? (Who is musical?), which was published posthumously by Hanslick. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply scientific methods to musicality. In the essay, Billroth identifies different types of amusicality; tone deafness, rhythm-deafness, harmony-deafness, that suggest the different cognitive skills involved in our perception of music. Billroth died in Opatija, Austria-Hungary, before he could complete the research.
Excelling at both his vocation and his avocation, Billroth never saw science and music as being in conflict. On the contrary, he considered the two to complement each other. "It is one of the superficialities of our time to see in science and in art two opposites," he wrote in a letter. "Imagination is the mother of both."[2]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Letter written Sept. 3, 1888, translated in Dorothy Schullian and Max Schoen, Music and Medicine (1948) New York, Henry Schuman, Inc.
- ^ Letter to Lubke, quoted in F. William Sunderman, "Theodor Billroth as Musician", Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 25/4, May 1937, available online at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=233819&blobtype=pdf
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