Memories of Mexico

Physician Samuel Siegfried Karl von Basch was born in Prague and studied medicine in his hometown and in Vienna. In 1865 he took the position of chief surgeon at the military hospital in Puebla, Mexico. He then became the personal physician of Emperor Maximilian I, until the latter’s defeat and execution in 1867. Von Basch’s memoirs of Mexico provide a window into the region’s final, tumultuous months under Habsburg rule. Von Basch returned to Austria to teach at the University of Vienna and was granted a knighthood for his service in Mexico—an honor rarely bestowed upon Jews at the time. A medical researcher, he is noted for having developed a new means to measure blood pressure: the sphygmomanometer.