Professor Bochdalek and His Hernia: Then and Now

Abstract

Vincent Alexander Bochdalek was born in 1801 of a Czech father who was a gamekeeper and a Slovak mother who lived in the village of Skripov in northern Moravia. Before his death in 1883, he became one of the most outstanding university anatomists and pathologists of his era. He studied in Opava and Vienna and graduated with a degree in medicine from the Carolinum in Prague in 1833. The dissertation he submitted for his graduate degree, entitled “Instruction to Practical Autopsy of the Human Brain with Special Attention to the Cerebellum,” was published as a monograph containing 19 defended theses that clearly indicate Bochdaleks lively interest in the broad problems of medicine of his time. Bochdalek spent his entire career in the Prague dissecting rooms and was appointed to the faculty of the Carolinum, where he became a much respected senior academician. He was also very active in the general infirmary, where he introduced the keeping of post mortem records and reported a few microscopic examinations of autopsied material even before his more famous successor, J. E. Purkyne. Foliowing an extensive trip to Scandinavia, he brought home more than 1200 anatomical preparations of the sea fauna which he had carefully categorized and studied.