Dr Friedrich Bayer surgeon for Adelaide's first operation under ether in 1847; builds biggest practice in city
Friedrich Carl Bayer was one of the first six six honorary medical officers appointed to Adelaide Hospital in 1849.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Dr Friedrich Carl Bayer was the surgeon in 1847 for the first Adelaide operation (amputating a breast) performed with the patient under ether. The anaesthetist for the operation was Bayer’s partner, the esteemed Dr Benjamin Archer Kent, pioneer of the Adelaide’s eastern inner suburb Kent Town.
Bayer was one of seven German universities medical graduates (others: Ferdinand von Sommer, Frederick Emil Renner, William Hillebrand, Richard William Schmidt, J. Dietrich Wehl and Anton Sotslowsky) among the first 60 legally qualified medical practitioners in South Australia.
Bayer was unusual in coming from southern Bavaria, with most German doctors arriving in South Australia among the Lutheran religious and later political refugees from northern Prussia.
Bayer had been barred from the Bavarian medical system for refusing to give the names of those taking part in a fatal duel. He also found an official blockage in South Australia when its medical board, formed in 1844, ruled that he could only practise among German settlers because his diploma was from a university (Erlangen) not recognised in London. Bayer has become a protégé of Henry Noltenius, a prominent South Australian colonist as a merchant from Bremen. A threat to take Bayer case’s to the colony’s governor Frederick Robe saw the medical board back down a few days after his operation under ether with Dr Kent.
Bayer’s marriage to Kent’s daughter in 1848 further opened his way into the colony's British society. In 1849, the government appointed him one of six honorary medical officers who took over the role of the colonial surgeon in looking after patients at Adelaide Hospital. (He resigned in 1851 over the hospital's medical committee directing what and whose drugs the doctors could prescribe. Bayer: "I did not like being dictated to... I said I would not be humbugged any longer".)
As the only registered German doctor working in the city, Bayer built a large German following plus popularity among “English” patients, including leading colonial figures. He soon had the largest practice in Adelaide, with a large house on North Terrace among his properties.
Dr Bayer was the leading figure in the ultimately failed effort to establish a German hospital in Adelaide.