Walter Schiller was born in Vienna in 1887, the only child of Friedrich and Emma Schiller, who were of
Jewish descent. He studied in Vienna, working as a demonstrator of physiology under
Sigmund Exner and pathology under
Anton Weichselbaum. He received his doctorate from the
University of Vienna in 1912, and worked as a
bacteriologist in the
Bulgarian Army during the
First Balkan War in the same year. He trained in pathology under Weichselbaum, and was a
Medizinaloffizier in charge of a medical laboratory in the
Austro-Hungarian Army during
World War I, serving in
Bosnia,
Russia,
Turkey and
Palestine. From 1918 to 1921 he was pathologist to the Second Military Hospital of Vienna, where he worked with
Hans Eppinger. From 1921 to 1936 he was Director of Laboratories at the second Gynaecological Clinic of the University of Vienna, where he carried out studies on
cervical cancer and developed his
eponymous test. He published this work in
German in 1927 and in
English in 1933, and wrote one of the earliest papers on
dysgerminoma in 1934. Schiller travelled extensively during the 1930s, lecturing in
England,
Dublin and the
United States. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States with his wife and two daughters due to the threat of
Nazism, working initially at the Jewish Memorial Hospital in
New York City. He became Director of Pathology at the
Cook County Hospital,
Chicago in 1938, and started publishing on
ovarian tumours in 1939. and the
Schiller-Duval bodies which had previously been described in rats by
Mathias-Marie Duval. == References ==