Leo Buerger

Leo Buerger was born i Vienna, but his family migrated to the USA when he was one. He was educated at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, where he graduated in 1901, interning on the surgical service at Lennox Hill Hospital. He studied at the Breslau Surgical Clinic in Germany for a time and then returned to private practice in New York where from 1905 he had an attachment to the Mt. Sinai Hospital as professor of urological surgery.

Buerger concerned himself with radiology and developed a radium therapy against malign tumours of the bladder. In collaboration with F. Tilder Brown he developed a cystoscope. It became known as the Brown-Buerger cystoscope, but it is said that he tried to change to that of Buerger's cystoscope.

He was fond of music and his first wife was a concert pianist. On his remarriage in 1929 he moved to Los Angeles to the Chair of Urology at the College of Medical Evangelists. He seems to have been a rather brash personality and was not well liked in California, and when he returned to New York in 1934 he was not reappointed to the staff of Mt. Sinai.