Ismar Isidor Boas

Ismar Isidor Boas was the son of a lesser merchant. He studied in Berlin as the pupil of Carl Anton Ewald (1845-1915), then in Halle and Leipzig. He received his doctorate in Halle in 1881, then went to Leipzig to pass his state examinations. From 1882 to 1886 was a general practitioner in Berlin, and subsequently joined professor Ewald, with whom he had been close as a student, in Berlin as his assistant and private secretary at the Augusta Hospital. Here, influenced by Ewald, he concerned himself with the physiology and pathology of digestion, which enabled him, in 1886, to become the first licensed specialist of diseases of the gastro-intestinal system in Germany.

Shortly after Kussmaul's introduction of the gastric tube, Boas and Ewald introduced the test meal to measure gastric secretion, and Boas rapidly gained an international reputation in gastroenterology.

In 1886 he founded the first policlinic for diseases of the stomach and the intestines in Germany, in which he was to educate numerous students from all parts of the world. From 1886 he was active as specialist on metabolic diseases in Berlin.

Boas was the first to recognise "occult blood" and pioneered its use in patient investigation. In 1895 he founded the medical journal Archiv für Verdauungs-Krankheiten, the first journal devoted to the subject of gastro-enterology, and in 1920 set up the German gastroenterological society. He left Berlin for Vienna in 1936 with the rise of the Nazis and died there two years later as Austria too succumbed to Nazism.

We thank Søren Nørby, Denmark, for information submitted.

• Allgemeine Diagnostik und Therapie der Magenkrankheiten. Leipzig, 1890.
• Spezielle Diagnostik und Therapie der Magenkrankheiten. 1893.
  The two above work were united in one volume from 1911, and translated into several languages. 8th and 9th edition, 1925.
• Ueber Darmsaftgewinnung beim Menschen. (Vorläufige Mittheilung).
  Zentralblatt für klinische Medizin, Leipzig, 1889, 10: 97-99. Duodenal respiration.
• Diagnostik und Therapie der Magenkrankheiten. Nnach dem heutigen Stande der Wissenschaft.
  2 volumes, Leipzig, 1890-1893; 2nd edition, 1901.
• Diagnostik und Therapie der Magenkrankheiten. Nnach dem heutigen Stande der Wissenschaft. Theil I: Allgemeine Diagnostik der Magenkrankheiten.
  4th, expanded and revised edition. Leipzig, Verlag von Georg Thieme, 1897.
• Über Schwefelwasserstoffbildung bei Magenkrankheiten.
  Zentralblatt für klinische Medizin, Leipzig, 1895; 3: 68-70.
• Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Cholelithiasis.
  Münchener medizinische Wochenshrift, 1902, 49: 604-609.
• Gesammelte Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Verdauungskrankheiten.
  Berlin, 1906.
• Grundlinien der Therapeutischen Methodik in der inneren Medizin. 1909.
• Die Lehre von den okkulten Blutungen. 1914.
• Diätetik der Magen- und Darmkrankheiten.
  With Georg Kelling (1866-1945). Dresden, 1920; 2nd edition, 1926.
• Therapie und Therapeutik. Berlin, 1930.