Theodor Karl Gustav von Leber

Biography of Theodor Karl Gustav von Leber

Theodor Karl Gustav von Leber was the son of a professor of languages in Karlsruhe. Initially he was attracted to the study of chemistry, but the great professor Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (1811-1899) advised him to study medicine, as there were far too many chemists. He was a pupil of Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894) in Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1862 and spent a year as an assistant to Herman Jakob Knapp (1832-1911) at the Heidelberg eye clinic.

Leber subsequently went to Vienna to study physiology under Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (1816-1895), but soon turned to ophthalmology, becoming an assistant to Albrecht Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst von Graefe (1828-1870) in Berlin for the period 1867-1870. He also stayed for some time in Paris.

Leber was habilitated for ophthalmology in Berlin in 1869. He became professor extraordinary of opthalmology and director of the university eye clinic in Göttingen in 1871, and in 1890 he was called to the chair and the directorship of the Eye Clinic at Heidelberg, where he remained until his retirement in 1910.

From 1871 Leber was co-publisher and geschäftsführender editor of Albrecht von Grafe's Archiv für Ophthalmologie.

A scholarship given by the German Ophthalmological Society is named for him: Theodor-Leber-Stipendium zur Förderung der pharmakologischen und pharmakophysiologischen Forschung in der Augenheilkunde.

We thank Günter Krämer and Patrick Jucker-Kupper, both Switzerland, for information submitted.