Christian Gerhard Leopold

Christian Gerhard Leopold was one of the outstanding German gynaecologists at the turn of the last century. He studied medicine in Leipzig, where he was strongly influenced by Carl Sigmund Franz Credé (1819-1892), his teacher in obstetrics and gynaecology. He obtained his doctorate in 1870. After the Franco-Prussian war he went to Breslau, Vienna, London, and Edinburgh, and was habilitated for obstetrics in 1873 in Leipzig. From 1877-1883 he taught midwifery at the women's clinic in Leipzig, but already on 1883 he was called to Leipzig as extraordinary professor at the university. That same year was invited to Dresden to take over directorship of the school of midwifery and the Dresden Royal Gynaecological Infirmary – the K. Frauenklinik und Hebammenlehranstalt, succeeding Franz Karl Ludwig Wilhelm von Winckel (1837-1911). Under his chairmanship the clinic developed into a leading hospital in Germany.

Most of his papers appeared in the journal Archiv für Gynäkologie. Following Credé’s death Leopold from 1894 was co-editor, with Adolf Ludwig Sigismund Gusserow (1836-19069, of Archiv für Gynäkologie. With Credé and Paul Zweifel (1848-1927) he was the publisher of widely used textbooks on midwifery.

He died in 1911, following a heart attack, on his property in Bärenburg in the Erzgebirge.

• Studien über die Uterusschleimhaut während Menstruation, Schwangerschaft und Wochenbett. Berlin, 1878.
• Das skoliotisch- und kyphoskoliotisch-rachitische Becken. Leipzig, 1879.
• Der Kaiserschnitt und seine Stellung zur künstlichen Frühgeburt. 1886 to 1897.
• Über die Annährung der retroflektierten aufgerichteten Gebärmutter and der vorderen Bauchwand. [Volkmann’s] Sammlung klinischer Vorträge, Leipzig, 1889.
• Arbeiten aus der königlichen Frauenklinik in Dresden. 4 volumes.
  Leipzig, 1893-1907.
• Uterus und Kind. 2 volumes. Leipzig, 1897.
• U. Ulrich:
  Christian Gerhard Leopold (1846-1911).
  Geburtshilfe und Frauenheilkunde, Stuttgart, May 1992, 52 (5): 310-312. List of works in Monatsschrift für Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie, 1911, 34: X.