Biography

(l ´r nts h ´sht r) (KEY) , 1683–1758, German surgeon. Having studied anatomy under the famous Dutch master Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), Heister served as an army surgeon in several campaigns before becoming professor of anatomy and surgery at Altdorf. Distressed at the inferior state of surgery in Germany he published his Chirurgie (Nuremberg, 1718), based on extensive readings of the foremost French authorities. This influential and profusely illustrated work became the standard text on the subject and was widely reprinted and translated. The English version (1748) was the first systematic treatise on surgery to appear in that language. Heister was the first to study the pathology of appendicitis (1711), as well as the first to use the term tracheotomy (1718).

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