Fürst, Alexander

German physician; born at Braunsberg April 15, 1844; died in Berlin May 25, 1898. He studied medicine at Königsberg, and took his degree at Berlin (1867). An assistant first in a private hospital at Schöneberg, near Berlin, and afterward in Dr. Schneller's ophthalmic institute at Danzig, he became a practising physician in Memel (1869). He served through the Franco-Prussian war as military physician, returning at its conclusion (1871) to Memel, where he was one of the founders of a small hospital, and where he also engaged in scientific work. Patients even from the interior of Russia came to him for ophthalmic treatment. He was the first to discover leprosy in East Prussia, and among the first there to treat granular inflammation of the eyes. The measures taken by the government to oppose the spread of these diseases were due to him. In 1884 he removed to Berlin, where he became a "people's doctor" in the best sense of the term.

Bibliography:

  * Bettelheim, Biog. Jahrbuch, 1900, iii. 129-130;
  * Allg. Zeit. des Jud. June 3, 1898.



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