Eduard Zeis

Eduard Zeis (October 1, 1807 - June 28, 1868) was a German surgeon and ophthalmologist who was a native of Dresden.

He studied medicine at the Universities of Leipzig, Bonn and Munich, and received his doctorate at Leipzig in 1832. Afterwards he opened a general practice in his hometown of Dresden, and in 1844 became a professor of surgery at the University of Marburg. In 1850 he returned to Dresden and was senior medical officer at the newly founded city hospital in Dresden-Friedrichstadt.

Eduard Zeis is remembered for publishing the first textbook of plastic surgery, Handbuch der plastischen Chirurgie (1838), of which he first introduces the term plastische chirurgie (plastic surgery). Its foreword was written by famed surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach (1792-1847), and the textbook has since been translated into English. He also published an influential study concerning dreams of the blind.

His name is associated with the eponymous "glands of Zeis", which are sebaceous glands that open into the follicles of the eyelashes, and "Zeisian sty", which is an inflammation of one of Zeis' glands.