[Our surgical heritage: tragic destinies of surgeons. The senseless destruction of a talent: Ernst Jeger (1884-1915)].

The Austrian physician Ernst Jeger born in 1884 got an all-round training in internal medicine, physiology and surgery (Vienna, London, Berlin, Breslau). J. was especially interested in vessel and heart surgery. He did a lot of experimental work in this field, visited Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute (New York) in 1912 and published a comprehensive and even today astonishing book, entitled "Surgery of Vessels and Heart" (1913). At the beginning of World War I Jeger was called up and became a military surgeon. He was taken prisoner and died from typhoid fever in August 1915.