The Stamp
The stamp was issued in Austria on 5 December 1937 as part of a series of stamps showing famous Austrian physicians. Its face value was 40 Groschen, a groschen being 1/100 of an Austrian schilling.
The Doctor
Joseph Hyrtl was Professor of Anatomy at the University of Vienna. He was born on 7 December 1810 in Kismarton, Hungary (now Eisenstadt) but trained in Vienna at the Gymnasium and medical school. He became an anatomy prosector there for two years and then moved to Prague to be Professor of Anatomy.
In 1845 he returned to Vienna to become Professor, creating an anatomy museum to rival the Hunterian in London. He was an expert in the injection and corrosion technique of specimen preparation.
After retiring to his villa at Perchtoldsdorf in 1874, he continued to work collecting every German anatomy book since the invention of printing and studied the derivation of anatomical terminology. He died in his sleep on 17 July 1894.
Urology Connections
In 1882, Joseph Hyrtl described the non-anastomotic vascularisation of the kidney, a relatively avascular area of renal cortex between the anterior and the posterior branch territories of the renal artery, which creates the “bloodless line of the kidney”. This is also called the "bloodless line of Brödel", after Max Brödel (1870 – 1941), medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore USA.
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