Eduard Zeis

Who was Eduard Zeis?

Eduard Zeis was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist born in Dresden.

He studied medicine at the Universities of Leipzig, Bonn and Munich, receiving his doctorate at Leipzig in 1832. Afterwards he opened a general practice in his hometown of Dresden, later becoming a professor of surgery at the University of Marburg. In 1850 he returned to Dresden and was senior medical officer at the newly founded city hospital in Dresden-Friedrichstadt.

In 1838 he published the first textbook of plastic surgery, "Handbuch der plastischen Chirurgie", of which he established the term "plastische chirurgie". Its foreword was written by famed surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, and the textbook has since been translated into English. In 1838 Zeis published a study involving dreams of the blind.

His name is associated with the eponymous "glands of Zeis", described as sebaceous glands that open into the follicles of the eyelashes, as well as to "Zeisian sty", which is an inflammation of one of Zeis' glands.