Asher, Leon:

By: Isidore Singer , Frederick de Sola Mendes

German physician; born April 13, 1865, in Leipsic. He is the son of Dr. David Asher, for many years secretary to Chief Rabbi Nathan M. Adler in London. Leon Asher, after graduating from the public school in Leipsic, studied medicine at the university of that city from 1885 to 1890, and received the degree of M.D. Having worked in the line of medical and psychical research, he went in 1891 to Heidelberg, where he was engaged as laboratory assistant with W. Kühne and G. Quincke. In 1894 he became assistant at the Bern Physiological Institute in Switzerland, and in 1895 privat-docent at the university. He spent the summer vacations of 1896-98 in the laboratory of the physiologist Hering in Leipsic, and in 1901 was appointed professor of medicine in Bern University.

Asher's researches cover a wide field in nervous and muscular physiology, including the physiology of the sense functions and of the transformation of tissue. Aided by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, he experimented considerably in the direction of ascertaining the qualities of lymph and the precise mode of its formation; the majority of his conclusions are now accepted in the medical world. He edits, together with K. Spiro, an annual entitled "Ergebnisse der Physiologie."