WASSERMANN, AUGUST VON 1925), _erman professor of medicine, was born Feb. 21, 1866, at Bamberg, in Bavaria. He studied in Erlangen, Munich, Strasbourg and Vienna, and in 1888 began to practise as a physician in Strasbourg. He was then engaged as an assistant to the Robert Koch institute for Infectious Diseases, Berlin, where, from 1906, he directed the department of experimental therapy and serum research. In 1913 he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute in Berlin-Dahlem. Wassermann achieved international fame by his discovery (1907) of sero-diagnosis in syphilis—the so-called Wassermann Reaction—which enables both past infection and the activity of the process of the disease to be ascertained. He
died in Berlin on March 15, 1925.
His works include "Allgemeine Einleitung zur Lehre von den Infek tionskrankheiten" in Ebstein and Schwalbe's Handbuch der prak tischen medegia: Influenza, Immunitiit and Serumtherapie and Hiimo lysine, Zytotoxine and Prdzipitine (19w).