Emil Zuckerkandl (1849-1910): Anatomist and pathologist

Emil Zuckerkandl (1849-1910), an Austrian anatomist and pathologist, is remembered with several eponyms; organ of Zuckerkandl (para-aortic chromaffin body), Zuckerkandl's fascia (posterior layer of the renal fascia), Zuckerkandl's gyrus (subcallosal area), Zuckerkandl's tuberculum (lateral projection of the thyroid gland), Zuckerkandl's operation (perineal prostatectomy), Zuckerkandl's dehiscence (fissures in the ethmoid bone), and concha of Zuckerkandl (a rare nasal concha). He was a favorite pupil of both Josef Hyrtl (1810-1894) and Carl von Langer (1819-1887) at the Vienna School of Anatomy, and succeeded the chair of anatomy there. Zuckerkandl strove to make anatomy “subservient” to the patient and thus was an early pioneer of clinical anatomy. He was prolific and wrote over 164 publications at the time of his death. His wife, Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps, was a famous Austrian journalist and a remarkable personality of Jewish society in Vienna during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War II. Emil Zuckerkandl left a tremendous legacy regarding anatomical knowledge. This early anatomist was credited with the comment that “anatomy is the war map for the operations of the physician”. This concept gave rise to many surgical subspecialities and his anatomical descriptions serve as a basis of our current morphological understanding.