Amputation of the lower leg.

Unterschenkelamputation.

1903

1 film reel (3 min.) : silent, black and white

Werner, Haase credited as author https://av.tib.eu/media/11835 distributed by Reichsanstalt für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (RWU).

Recopied with caption, 1941, by Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film, Gottingen, West Germany. See Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film, "Filmkatalog: Medizi" (Gottingen, 1990), p.264.

This is the earliest known film of surgery in Germany and the only known film of Professor E. von Bergmann (1836-1908), reputed to be one of the greatest masters of surgery at the beginning of the century. Bergmann learnt his craft over the course of three wars and specialised in the treatment of war wounds. The film was never publicly shown and until 1936, was lost in obscurity in the teaching archives of the University Surgical Clinic, Ziegelstrasse, Berlin - when it was rediscovered and screened to celebrate the anniversary of Bergmann's birth. Great pains were made to restore the film, create a print that ran on a projector and to research its origins, although many of the contemporary potential eyewitnesses were long since dead. The origins of the film are obscure: it is thought to be connected to the great French physician Eugene Louis Doyen (1859-1916) who, despite his evident genius, had alienated himself from the French medical mainstream. Bergmann himself had suffered a professional disagreement with a notable English physician some years earlier and had then felt compelled to resign as one of the Crown Prince's physicians (his reputation was later restored) so he may have been sympathetic to Doyen's plight. Bergmann, at sixty-seven years of age in 1903, was an experienced lecturer and Doyen had already shot about 400 films, ostensibly for educational reasons, but which were widely thought to be a form of self-promotion of his own surgical techniques. There is also a possibility that the film was commissioned or funded in part by Oskar Messter (1866-1943), a German film tycoon known to have been in Berlin at this time. He had filmed in the Clinic before, but for reasons of hygiene (although no surgical masks or hair-covering are used at this operation) and the risk of distracting the surgical team, permission to film operations had been granted only on corpses. Even in 1936, the actual clinical notes for this patient had been lost. It was known that the patient was a man. The reason for the amputation was thought to be a form of tuberculosis, as the foot is covered, possibly to prevent further infection. The source material is an article held in the department in German.

Institut fur den Wissenschaftlichen Film