Emil theodur kocher biography of williams

Emil Theodor Kocher won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland. Kocher has given his name to the Kocher Institut in Bern.

Kocher studied in Zurich, Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna, a student of Theodor Billroth (1829-1894) and Bernhard von Langenbeck (1810-1887). Kocher received his medical doctorate in Bern in 1865. Following en educational journey abroad he was assistant with professor Georg Albert Lücke (1829-1884) in the surgical clinic in Bern, where Lücke operated on 10 patients with goitre and 9 died. He succeeded Lücke as professor of surgery in Bern in 1872 and in 1874 published his first 13 goitre operations with only 2 deaths. He did much experimental work on the thyroid gland and was the first to excise the thyroid for goitre in 1876.

In 1883 Kocher announced his discovery of a cretinoid pattern in patients after total excision of the thyroid gland¸ when a porti

•

---

Theodor Kocher was born on August 25, 1841, at Berne (Fig. 1). His father Jacob Alexander was the chief engineer of the Canton Berne and his mother Maria, a descendent of the Moravian Brethren. She passed on to her son a deeply religious philosophy which would help him gain an empathetic understanding of his patients in years to come. He did his school education from Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna. He received his MD from the University of Berne in 1869. That same year he married Marie Witchi-Courant. He had three sons, the eldest of whom, Albert, became a surgeon [1–3].

Fig. 1.

Open in a new tab

Kocher visited various European clinics, including the one in Vienna, where he studied under Theodor Billroth. From 1872 to 1886, he was associate professor of surgery to Professor Luche in Berne. In 1872 following Luche’s death, Kocher was named Professor of Clinical Surgery at same university. He devoted his medical career to making thyroidectomy a relatively safe procedure by a

•

---

Open in a new tab

Theodor Kocher, the second of six children of an engineer father and a Pietist mother, was born in Bern, Switzerland, on 25 August 1841. He studied medicine in Bern and Zurich. Having come into contact with Theodor Billroth and witnessed Thomas Spencer Wells performing Switzerland’s first oophorectomy, he decided to become a surgeon.

While on a study trip (1865–1866), he met Bernhard von Langenbeck, and volunteered to work in Rudolf Virchow’s laboratory, in Berlin. In London, he observed Spencer Wells paving the way for surgical intervention in the abdominal cavity, previously avoided for fear of lethal infections. Wells’s ‘cleanliness-and-cold-water’ surgery and frank statistics contrasted sharply with the ‘dirty’ surgery Kocher saw in Paris, where professors did not inform students about the fate of operated patients.

After graduation, Kocher became the sole assistant in the Surgical Clinic of Bern University (1866–1869) and applied Lister’s anti-septic