Friedrich Göppert

Friedrich Göppert (25 October 18709 February 1927) was a German paediatrician who worked at the University of Göttingen from 1910 to 1927. He was the first to describe Galactosemia.

Life and career Friedrich Göppert was born in Kattowitz on 25 October 1870. His grandfather was the botanist and palaeontologist Heinrich Göppert; his father was a notable lawyer and an advisor to the Prussian Minister of Culture. All four of his brothers worked in the national or state civil service. He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Berlin, and obtained his doctorate in medicine in Breslau in 1896. He then worked as an assistant at the children's clinics in Berlin, working under Otto Heubner, and Breslau, where he was an assistant to Adalbert Czerny.

Göppert was the first to describe the disease Galactosemia, in a paper published in 1917. Its cause as a defect in galactose metabolism was later identified by a group led by Herman Kalckar in 1956. Other papers described calcium therapy and treatments for dysentery, and he wrote a book on diphtheria.

Works Grundlegende Studien über die Genickstarre anlässlich der Erforschung der in Oberschlesien herrschenden Epidemie, 1905 Die Nasen-, Hals- und Ohrenkrankheiten des Kindes in der täglichen Praxis, 1914 Prophylaxe und Therapie der Kinderkrankheiten, 1920 Diphtherie, 1925 (Bergmanns Handbuch Band 1)