21 Facts About Rudolph Nissen

Rudolph Nissen was a German surgeon who chaired surgery departments in Turkey, the United States and Switzerland.

Rudolph Nissen trained under German physicians Ludwig Aschoff and Ferdinand Sauerbruch.

Rudolph Nissen was born in a Jewish-German family in Neisse, Silesia, German Empire, in 1896.

Rudolph Nissen was the son of Franz Nissen, a well-known surgeon.

Rudolph Nissen pursued medical studies in Munich, Marburg and Breslau.

Rudolph Nissen then trained in pathology under influential physician Ludwig Aschoff at the University of Freiburg.

Six years later, Sauerbruch and Rudolph Nissen moved to the Charite at the University of Berlin.

In 1933, Rudolph Nissen became the surgery department head at Istanbul University.

The move was prompted by Hitler's Jewish boycott, although Rudolph Nissen was at first not directly affected by anti-Jewish legislation because he had been an active World War I front soldier.

Rudolph Nissen left Turkey for the United States in 1939, and later moved to the United States.

Rudolph Nissen was a surgery research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital for two years, and spent several years in New York as chair of the surgery programs at Jewish Hospital and Maimonides Medical Center.

Rudolph Nissen was a department head at the University of Basel from 1952 to his retirement in 1967.

The operation required Rudolph Nissen to remove a portion of the lower esophagus and join the remaining esophagus to the stomach.

Rudolph Nissen even performed one of these procedures, an anterior gastropexy, on eminent radiologist Gustav Bucky.

Rudolph Nissen published the results of the two cases in 1956.

In 1931, Rudolph Nissen treated a 12-year-old girl who had sustained a crush injury to the chest with chronic pus production from the left lung.

Rudolph Nissen elected to perform left pneumonectomy, or removal of the lung.

Rudolph Nissen was the first Western physician to complete the procedure; successful pneumonectomy was reported in the United States in 1933.

In December 1948, Rudolph Nissen admitted Albert Einstein to Jewish Hospital for removal of intestinal cysts.

Rudolph Nissen wrapped the aneurysm with cellophane and Einstein recovered from the surgery.

The Rudolf Rudolph Nissen Prize is awarded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Allgemein- und Viszeralchirurgie to recognize surgeons who have advanced the field of gastroenterological surgery.