Erwin Payr

Erwin Payr (February 17, 1871 - April 6, 1946) was an Austrian-German surgeon who was born in Innsbruck. He was a professor of surgery and assistant to Carl Nicoladoni (1847-1902) at the University of Graz, and later chief surgeon at the Universities of Greifswald, Königsberg and then Leipzig (1911), where he remained for nearly 25 years.

Payr was regarded as an excellent physician known for his expertise in all facets of surgery. He was the first surgeon to use ozone treatments in order to control and kill bacteria, a practice he learned from Swiss dentist E.A. Fisch. Later he administered ozone for circulatory problems and other disorders, and in 1944 he published "On Treatment With Ozone In Surgery".

Splenic-flexure syndrome or "Payr's disease" is named after a condition he described. Payr's disease is constipation due to kinking of an adhesion between the transverse and descending colon. Also a tool used in abdominal surgery called a "Payr pylorus clamp" is named after him. Payr introduced the use of absorbable magnesium sutures in vascular surgery, and used elderberry stems for capillary drainage of brain abscesses. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9577929&dopt=Abstract]

References

* [http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:9577929 Biography of Erwin Payr]