Site of the Home of Dr. Ferdinand Ludwig Herff

Herff's San Antonio surgery drew crowds. He first used chloroform to remove two large bladder stones from a Texas Ranger while onlookers, among them Big Foot Wallace, watched. He restored sight by removing cataracts, relieved epilepsy by correcting a depressed skull fracture, and became known for removing arrows; one patient traveled more than 100 miles to reach him. Much of this work was done in homes, hotels and even outdoors, and most of his patients were poor. In the Hessian army his insistence on cleanliness, before antisepsis, had kept infection rates low.

What the plaque says

Site of the Home of Dr. Ferdinand Ludwig Herff Ferdinand Ludwig Von Herff (1820-1912) was the son of Christian and Eleanora (Von Meusebach) Herff, prominent citizens of Darmstadt, Germany. The younger Von Herff studied in Giessen, Bonn and Berlin, graduating with a medical degree in 1843. He served as a surgeon in the Hessian army, achieving recognition in plastic surgery, cataract extraction and tuberculosis treatment. In 1847 he joined a group known as Die Vierziger (The Forty), who founded an idealistic commune in Texas called Bettina (near present Castell). The utopian enterprise failed within a year, and Von Herff returned to Germany, where he was pressed into military service during the German Revolution. He married Mathilde Klingerhöeffer (1823-1910) in 1849, and they were on the way back to Texas by year's end. The couple dropped the title "Von" from their name when they became American citizens. They lived briefly in New Braunfels, then settled in San Antonio in 1850. Active in city, cultural and medical affairs, Herff was a city alderman from 1850 to 1851. He helped form the Bexar County Medical Society and was a charter member of the Texas Medical Association in 1853. In 1855 he built a home on this site. Herff served as city health officer in 1860. Although he was a Confederate Army surgeon during the Civil War, his Union sympathies were known. In 1869, he was instrumental in founding San Antonio's first infirmary, operated by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. Herff served on the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners in 1880 and continued his general medical practice until 1908, performing his last surgery at age 87. He died in his home on the river in 1912. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• San Antonio River Walk — steps away
  A Depression-era park one level below downtown, built because San Antonio refused to pave its river after the 1921 flood, and designed by an architect the project later fired.
• La Villita Historic Arts Village — steps away
  The little village across the river from the presidio, where Cos surrendered San Antonio in 1835, rebuilt by Depression-era youth crews as a working crafts village.
• San Fernando Cathedral — 0.3 mi
  The Canary Islanders' parish church on Main Plaza, where Bowie married and Santa Anna raised a red flag, rebuilt in Gothic Revival around the walls of the 1750s church.
• The Alamo — 0.3 mi
  Mission San Antonio de Valero before it was a fort: a church its builders never finished, a thirteen-day siege in 1836, and the Army gable of 1850-52 that became its emblem.

More markers nearby

• The Pajalache Acequia (Ditch) — steps away
• Bowen's Island — steps away
• Groos National Bank — steps away
• Site of the Old Adobe — steps away