Blood is Not the Same as Blood
October 7, 1901

The well-known doctor, Karl Landsteiner, made a spectacular discovery.  He realized that blood in contact with the blood from other people coagulates.  Landsteiner is working from the assumption that there are several “Blood groups.”  He calls these “Blood groups” A, B, and C.

Karl Landsteiner was born in Vienna in 1868.  He lost his father at the age of six. He attended the secondary school in the 9^th district of Vienna.

He has been a doctor of medicine with the Viennese medical faculty since 1891.  For a while Landsteiner had questions, about whether blood was always safe to transmit.

He already introduced several experiments. Thus he assembled blood samples from his assistants.  Additionally he drew blood from himself and separated it in plasma liquid and blood corpuscles.  Afterwards he compounded all the samples with stranger’s red blood corpuscles.  In many cases heavy agglutination, in some but not all. These discoveries will have a big impact on blood transfusions.

Theodor Billroth is Dead
February 7, 1894

Yesterday, the famous surgeon Theodor Billroth died. He was born on April 26, 1829.  In 1859 he was a professor in Zurich.  By 1867 he was working in Vienna.  At the University of Vienna he discovered an important development for the area of intestinal surgery.

In 1874 he succeeded the complete excision of the larynx.  His first stomach-ectomy (excision of 2/3 of the stomach) in 1881 was a world sensation.  Also, Billroth improved anesthesia, so that the patients would have fewer side effects.  With the death of Theodor Billroth, the “Viennese school” has lost a significant surgeon.

Female Medical Students
October 3, 1900
This winter semester of 1900-1901, ten young women have begun their medical studies.  After the graduation of Gabriele von Possanna, the first woman in Austria to receive her doctor of medicine from the University of Vienna, many women want to follow suit.  We wish the young students lots of luck!