Morris Simmonds

Morris Simmonds was born on St. Thomas, which then belonged to Denmark. It is now the administrative centre of U.S. Virgin Islands. The family emigrated to Hamburg in 1861. He attended the Universities of Tübingen, Leipzig, Munich and Kiel, where he obtained his doctorate in 1879 and was assistant physician under the pathologist Arnold Ludwig Gotthilf Heller (1840-1913) and the surgeon Johannes Friedrich August von Esmarch (1823-1908).

Subsequent to his internship at the St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg, Simmonds established general practice, while still pursuing his chief interest, pathology, and in 1889 he became prosector at the hospital. Simmonds special fields of interest were the male genital apparatus and above all the endocrine glands. He published his description of cachexia hypophyseopriva in Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, 1914; 40: 332.

In 1909 Simmonds received the title of professor, and as the University of Hamburg was opened in 1919 he became professor of honour at the faculty. He died of Parkinson’s disease in 1925.

Simmonds was a collaborator in Karl Albert Ludwig Aschoff’s (1866-1942) textbook Pathologische Anatomie and co-publisher of the Verhandlungen der deutschen pathologischen Gesellschaft, Stuttgart.

• Über Form und Lage des Magens unter normalen und abnormalen Bedingungen. Jena, 1904.
• Eugen Fraenkel:
  Morris Simmonds +.
  Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, 1925, 72: 1738.