The History of Surgery in World War I: Erwin Payr (1871 – 1946)

The Austrian surgeon Erwin Payr can be regarded as an extraordinarily influential scholar and physician, both for the development of surgical science and clinical medicine around the time of World War I. Today the “Payr’s sign” and the “Payr’s disease” in clinical medicine are closely associated with Erwin Payr’s name and surgical instruments, like the “Payr pylorus clamp”, were also named after him. Furthermore, some of Erwin Payr’s former assistants and senior physicians, for example, Martin Kirschner (1879-1942), Herbert Olivecrona (1891-1980), Antoni Tomasz Jurasz (1882-1961), Masao Sumita (1878-1946), Otto Kleinschmidt (1880-1948), Josef Hohlbaum (1884-1945), Paul Frangenheim (1876-1930), Heinrich Kuntzen (1893-1977), and Ernst Heller (1877-1964), in part later became extremely influential surgeons and international medical scholars. This article discusses an original historical correspondence from Payr to Emil Krückmann (1865-1944) from October 7, 1916. This original correspondence also includes a handwritten message to Arthur Brückner (1877-1975), written by an unidentifiable physician on the backside of the typewritten correspondence. The existence of this original material shows that surgery in World War I partly had a very provisional character and that the treatment of the patients could have been, at least to some extent, chaotic and not well organized with frequent changes in the physicians’ responsibility for their patients.