Prof. Dr. med.
Richard Mühsam
1872 - 1938

Richard Mühsam grew up in Berlin. He was the son of  the doctor Dr. Eduard Mühsam and his wife Clara, née Jaffé. His father came from Pitschen/Byczyna, in the former district of Oppeln in Silesia, now Poland, and his mother from what is now Poznan, Poland.

Education and Places of Work

Mühsam studied medicine in Würzburg and Berlin after graduating from high school. He passed the state examination in Berlin in 1893 and received his doctorate in July of the same year with the thesis “Über den Fundort des Bacillus pyocyaneus und seine Farbproduction bei er Symbiose mit anderen Mikroorganismen”. He received his licence to practise medicine in 1894.

He worked with Carl Weigert at the Pathological-Anatomical Institute of the Senkenberg Foundation in Frankfurt in 1895/96. In November 1896, Richard Mühsam married Helene Ottilie Weigert, who was born in Berlin in 1875. Their son Eduard was born in 1897, and their daughter Gerda in 1909.
He was assistant and senior physician at the II. surgical department under Eduard Sonnenburg at the municipal hospital Berlin-Moabit from 1896 to 1906. Following Sonnenburg’s retirement, he assumed the function of the directing physician of this department from 1906 to 1919.

Mühsam actively participated in the First World War. He was appointed “Titular Professor” (senior lecturer) in 1918.

His clinical-scientific activities related to abdominal surgery, especially surgery of gastric perforation, surgery of the appendix and spleen. Mühsam temporarily turned his attention to sexual surgery.. In 1919/1920, he cooperated with the Magnus Hirschfeld Society and for a time performed gender reassignment surgery.

Mühsam headed the II Surgical Clinic at the Rudolf Virchow Municipal Hospital (RVK) in Berlin from 1920 to 1933 and was its medical director during the same period.

After 1933

In 1933, the Nazi authorities stripped Richard Mühsam of his position as chief surgeon at the RVK Berlin. He was dismissed from the public health service. He was subsequently able to run a practice in Berlin. On September 30, 1938, his medical license was revoked.

Richard Mühsam died at the age of 66 on November 21, 1938, at Martin Luther Hospital in Berlin-Schmargendorf as a result of a perforated duodenal ulcer. ..

Mühsam’s son, Dr. Eduard Mühsam, also a surgeon, and his daughter, Gerda M. Breit, fled Germany in 1939, traveling via Scotland and Great Britain to the United States.  His wife initially fled to England the same year. She managed to get to the USA from Liverpool in May 1943 and lived in Denver, Colorado henceforth. Dr. Eduard Mühsam lived in New York and died in 1977.

His grave is located at Cedar Park Cemetery, Paramus, Bergen, New Jersey.