[Maximilian Nitze (1848-1906): Obstetrician to urology].

Maximilian Carl Friedrich Nitze was born on the 18th of September 1848 in Berlin. In 1874 he passed his state examination in Leipzig for a doctorate in medicine. Nitze demonstrated the first urethroscope and cystoscope, which he had built with great effort and under considerable hardship, at the Dresden-Friedrichstadt Institute using a cadaver--this was the hour of birth of modern urology. Nitze's invention of the cystoscope and his achievements as a urologist have made urology into an independent specialist branch of medicine. This led, after his early death, to the establishment of the German Society for Urology and the Zeitschrift für Urologie in 1906, as well as the organization of the first urological congress in Vienna in 1907.