Richard Lewisohn

Richard Lewisohn (born July 12, 1875 in Hamburg , † August 11, 1961 in New York City ) was a German-American surgeon. At Mount Sinai Hospital, he developed procedures that made blood transfusion viable.

Lewisohn received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Freiburg in 1899 with a thesis on malignant kidney tumors. In 1906 he emigrated to the USA, where he worked as a gastroenterologist and surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City . In 1928 he became an attending surgeon on Mount Sinai. In 1937 he officially retired and became a Consulting Surgeon . He later became involved in cancer research and in 1954 founded the cell research laboratory on Mount Sinai.

After the Belgian physician Albert Hustin (1882–1967) had shown in 1914 that blood coagulation could be prevented during transfusions with sodium citrate , Lewisohn determined the optimal concentration of sodium citrate for this purpose in 1915. This made it possible in principle to preserve blood reserves, which was made possible for increasingly longer periods of time due to the subsequent development - in 1916 for two weeks.

With AA Berg from Mount Sinai, he performed the first partial gastrectomy in the USA in 1922 for the removal of gastric carcinomas . To do this, he traveled to Austria beforehand, where the method had already been used and where he familiarized himself with the surgical techniques. After the successful application on Mount Sinai, the treatment method spread to the rest of the USA.

In 1955 he received the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award and in 1959 he became an honorary member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the American College of Surgeons .

Web links

• English biography on Science Heroes, with photo
• Biography at PBS