page_title: Leopold Oser
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Leopold Oser / Career
caption_attribution_description: Introducing Kussmaul's gastroscope demonstrated by Dr. Hecker
context_page_description: Leopold Oser was an Austrian physician. He was a full professor at the University of Vienna and alongside Carl Anton Ewald from Berlin - was the first doctor to use a soft stomach tube instead of a rigid tube for gastroscopy.
context_section_description: After receiving his doctorate, Oser worked for five years as a secondary doctor at the Vienna General Hospital . From 1866, he headed the cholera department there. He was a department head at the General Polyclinic Vienna, as a co-founder, in 1872 alongside eleven other doctors, including Heinrich Auspitz, Carl von Rokitansky, Johann Schnitzler, Robert Ultzmann and Wilhelm Winternitz. It was primarily intended for the training of doctors and the care of poorer patients and was financed by the founders and later also from donations. The novelty of the Vienna Polyclinic was that efforts were made to cover the entire range of medical subjects, while foreign polyclinics were always geared towards individual medical fields. It was the first of its kind in Europe.
  In 1873 Oser was appointed primary physician in the newly opened hospital of the Israelite religious community, which he ran until his death. In the same year he completed his Habilitation. In Vienna, cholera broke out due to the large number of visitors to the 1873 World's Fair and the inadequate sewage system. So it was no coincidence that Oser did pioneering work in the field of cholera treatment. In 1874 he became a member of the Lower Austrian State Medical Council and from 1905 its chairman. In 1885 he became an associate professor of internal medicine at the Medical University of Vienna and in 1902 he received the professorship (o. Univ.-Prof.) with the title Ordinarius.
  In 1896 he became co-editor of the journal Archive for Digestive Diseases, newly founded by Ismar Isidor Boas, including metabolic pathology and dietetics, together with leading internists at international university clinics who at that early point in time had dealt with digestive and metabolic diseases and had published some monographs on them. After a short time it was one of the leading and internationally recognized publications in gastroenterology and still exists today under the name Digestion, International Journal of Gastroenterology.
  In 1907 Leopold Oser became a member of the board of trustees of Nathaniel Meyer von Rothschild’s Foundation for the Nervous Ill. Oser was a member of the Vienna Medical School and was awarded the honorary title of Hofrat .
caption: Gastroscopy / esophagoscopy with a rigid tube in 1896, despite the introduction of flexible gastric tube by Oser in 1875; About the technique of esophagoscopy, Wiener Klin. Weekly journal (No. 6 and 7, 1896)
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