1861 - 1956
Horst Oertel was born in Dresden, Germany, and immigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen. He received his medical degree from Yale in 1894, following which he undertook postgraduate study in pathology in Berlin, Leipzig and Wurzburg. On his return to the United States, he was appointed director of the Russell Institute of Pathology in New York. He later undertook a period of study at Guy's Hospital, London.
Oertel came to McGill in 1914 and was appointed acting Chair of Pathology in 1918 as a result of Adami’s activity in the European war. His support of the Museum was significantly less than that of Adami and, over Abbott’s objections, he reorganized the Pathology Department and its Museum in time to coincide with their transfer from the Strathcona Medical Building to the newly constructed Pathological Institute in 1924. He retired as Emeritus Professor of pathology in 1938.
Links
Wright, J. R. Jr (2024). Horst Oertel and the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology: Impacts on vital statistics and the origins of the short-lived heyday of autopsies in America. Clinical Anatomy, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ca.24241
James R. Wright; Horst Oertel’s Embattled Montreal Years and the Founding of the McGill Pathological Institute: Insights Into Early-20th-Century History of North American Pathology. Arch Pathol Lab Med 2025; doi: https://doi.org/10.5858/arpa.2025-0056-HP