Józef Dietl
Polish-Austrian medical doctor and politician (1804–1878)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Józef Dietl (24 January 1804 – 18 January 1878) was a Polish-Austrian medical doctor and politician. He was the mayor of Kraków in 1866–1874.
Life
Dietl was born on 24 January 1804 in Podbuże near Sambor to an Austrian father and Polish mother. He studied medicine in Lviv and Vienna. He was a pioneer in balneology, and a professor of Jagiellonian University, elected as its rector in 1861. Dietl described the kidney ailment known as "Dietl's crisis" as well as its treatment.
He is renowned worldwide for being a "reformer of medicine" since he demonstrated through experiments that bloodletting was useless if not dangerous.[1][2] His experiments were based on the use of a control group, a procedure still used today in the so-called "clinical trials" foundation of evidence-based medicine.[3]
From 1866 to 1874, Dietl was the mayor of Kraków. He died in Kraków on 18 January 1878, six days before his 74th birthday.
