[Hans Franz Edmund Killian - nestor of German anesthesia : Critical appraisal on the 125th anniversary of his birth]

Abstract

The surgeon Hans Killian was born on 5 August 1892 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Together with the pharmacologist Hellmut Weese and the surgeon Helmut Schmidt he was one of the nestors of modern German anesthesia. Early on during his scientific and clinical career, he addressed problems of surgical anesthesia and in 1928 he became one of the editors of the first German journal of anesthesia Narcosis and Anesthesia ("Narkose und Anästhesie"). In 1934 he published the textbook Anesthesia for Surgical Purposes ("Narkose zu operativen Zwecken"). Between World Wars I and II, he campaigned for anesthesia to become an independent medical discipline comparable to the situation in the Anglo-Saxon countries at that time. Because of his merits in the foundation of the German Society of Anesthesia on 10 April 1953 he became its first honorary member. Killian died on 7 March 1982 in Freiburg, Germany. Excerpts of his autobiography which he wrote a few years before his death and which were part of his inheritance are published here for the first time.

Keywords: Biographies; German Society of Anesthesia; Hans Killian; History of anesthesia; History of medicine.