Johannes Esser

Dutch plastic surgeon, chess player, millionaire and art collector. Esser was mainly raised by his neighbour the milk handler Leen Spruyt. Esser started the study of medicine in Leiden in 1897. He became a physician, but was also interested and knowledgeable about dentistry, which his sister in Leiden studied. He worked first as a general practitioner until 1913, when he went to Utrecht University to become a surgeon. He specialised in oral maxillofacial surgery and became a pioneer in the reconstruction of deformed faces by skin transplantation. When the Great War broke out he offered his plastic surgery skills to the Allied Forces, but the staff rejected him. He had not yet finished his surgery study. He worked for a time as a dentist in Holland, but he decided in 1915 to become a war surgeon for the opposite camp in respectively Brno, Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. He specialised in the surgical reconstruction of the by bombs and bullets deformed faces of soldiers that were hidden for the general public in reserved camps at that time ('les gueules cassées’). After the war he held a private practice in Berlin. In 1924 he was forced to go back to the Netherlands because of fiscal matters. Because he had not officially finished his surgery study in Utrecht, he could not do his medical job and went into business and art collection. But his dream remained a "Republic of Healing", a place where every skilled person could do plastic surgery. Greece offered him an island, but he did not want policeman on the island. Because of bad speculations he died poor and lonely in Chicago. Esser was a gifted chess player. He played simultaneous chess and became the Dutch chess champion of 1913 by defeating Rudolf Loman. His now famous art collection of early Dutch modernist art included Sluijters, Breitner and Mondriaan. Link to Dutch Wikepedia biography