Edwin Klebs

Edwin Klebs
Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs
Born	(1834-02-06)6 February 1834 Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia
Died	23 October 1913(1913-10-23) (aged 79) Bern, Switzerland
Nationality	German, Swiss
Fields	Pathology
Institutions	University of Bern University of Würzburg University of Prague University of Zurich Rush Medical College
Alma mater	University of Würzburg University of Berlin University of Königsberg
Doctoral advisor	Rudolf Virchow
Doctoral students	Ernst Tiegel, Otto Lubarsch

Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs (6 February 1834 – 23 October 1913) was a German-Swiss pathologist. He is mainly known for his work on infectious diseases. His works paved the way for the beginning of modern bacteriology, and inspired Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. He was the first to identify a bacterium that causes diphtheria, which was called Klebs–Loeffler bacterium (now Corynebacterium diphtheriae). He was the father of physician Arnold Klebs.

Klebs was born in Königsberg, Province of Prussia. He studied at the University of Würzburg under Rudolf Virchow in 1855 and received his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1858. He achieved his habilitation at the University of Königsberg the following year.

Klebs was an assistant to Virchow at the Charité in Berlin from 1861 until 1866, when he became a professor of pathology at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He married Rosa Grossenbacher, a Swiss, and also acquired Swiss citizenship. He served as a military physician for the Prussian Army in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War; several of his ancestors had fought during the Napoleonic Wars.

Klebs taught at Würzburg from 1872 to 1873, at Prague from 1873 to 1882, and at Zürich from 1882 to 1892. Because of disagreements with the rest of the faculty, the impetuous Klebs resigned from Zürich in 1893 and ran an unsuccessful private business in Karlsruhe and Strassburg in 1894.