Georg Bessau, the son of a physician, was born in Elbing near Danzig. He studied in Breslau, Wiirzburg and Berne, before returning to Breslau, where he took his state examinations in 1908. After working for several years at the Institute of Hygiene in Breslau under Richard Pfeiffer, he moved to the Children's Hospital. It was here, at first under Clemens yon Pirquet and later Ludwig Tobler, that he set out to undertake a member of bacteriological and immunological studies. After qualifying as a lecturer in 1914, his work was interrupted by the First World War, when he was recruited for medical duty.
In 1918, Bessau returned to the Breslau Children's Hospital, now under Karl Stolte. In 1920 he accepted the Chair at the University of Marburg and, only 2 years later, became Professor of Paediatrics and Director of the Children's Hospital in Leipzig. The hospital had 400 beds, outstanding laboratory facilities and a department of paediatric surgery. In 1932, more as the result of a sense of duty than out of conviction, he accepted the invitation to succeed Adalbert Czerny at the Children's Hospital of the Charit6 at the University of Berlin, where the facilities were not at all comparable.
The central themes of Bessau's research were the problems of infant nutrition and questions concerning the immunobiology of tuberculosis. For the invaluable knowledge provided by his research on tuberculosis, he was made an honorary member of the Robert Koch Institute. Practical paediatrics is indebted to him, among other things, for convincing his contemporaries of the necessity for a general programme for the prevention of rickets and for paving the way for the introduction of such treatment. For 10 years he was the Editor of Monatsschriftfar Kinderheilkunde.
The stimulating clinician and inspired researcher, Georg Bessau, died of a brain tumour at the age of 60 years. The spacious, new Berlin University Children's Hospital, built under his auspices, was totally destroyed towards the end of the Second World War.