Leo Eloesser (July 29, 1881 – October 4, 1976), a noted thoracic surgeon and volunteer of the Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, was born in San Francisco.[1] He spent his undergraduate years at Berkeley and in 1901 went to Germany to study medicine. He became a pioneer in the field of thoracic surgery and joined the faculty of the Stanford Medical School in 1912. A surgical procedure known as the Eloesser flap is named for him.[2][3][4]
At the end of World War II he was in China with the Eighth Route Army under the auspices of UNICEF.
Eloesser wrote a manual for use in Chinese midwifery training courses, Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Newborn: A Manual for Rural Midwives which was published in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.[6] In the 1960s, it influenced Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery (1977), and others in the U.S. midwifery movement.[7]
Eloesser spent the last 25 years of his life in Mexico with his companion, Joyce Campbell.[6]