1949 deaths

Hans Heinz Zerlett (17 October 1892 – 6 July 1949) was a German screenwriter and film director.

Eduard August Grüneisen (26 May 1877 – 5 April 1949) was a German physicist. The dimensionless thermodynamic measure known as Grüneisen parameter is named after him.

Kurt Warnekros (November 15, 1882–September 30, 1949) was a German gynaecologist and pioneer in sex reassignment surgery.

Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich (15 September 1880, in Stettin (Szczecin) – 28 July 1949, in Tübingen) was a German religious psychologist and philosopher.
Oesterreich was also interested in parapsychology. He argued against the philosophy of materialism.He was the author of Die Besessenheit (1921), a book on demonic possession. It was translated into English in 1966. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, was influenced by the book.

Julius Ferdinand Ruska (9 February 1867, Bühl, Baden – 11 February 1949, Schramberg) was a German orientalist, historian of science and educator.
He was a critical scholar of alchemical literature, and of Islamic science, raising many issues on attributions and sources of the texts, and providing translations. The range of his studies was wide, including the Emerald Tablet, a basic hermetic text. From 1924 he headed an institute in Heidelberg, where he has been a student.
Of his seven children, Ernst Ruska and Helmut Ruska were distinguished in their fields.

Robert Alesch (6 March 1906 – 25 January 1949) was a Catholic priest and collaborator with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

August Müller (1864 – 1949), born in Mönchengladbach, was a medical student at the University of Kiel, Germany, and a pioneer in the manufacture of contact lenses. In 1889, he presented at the university his doctoral thesis titled Eyeglasses and corneal lenses in which he described his efforts to grind scleral lenses from blown glass. Refinements in his process led him to be able to correct his own severe -14 dioptre myopia to within 0.50 D.Müller's compatriot Adolf Fick had published his work on contact lenses earlier in 1887, but his lenses were heavy and could only be worn for short periods. Müller's lenses were lighter and shaped to match the curved contour of the cornea. He suggested that the lens would remain in place on the cornea due to capillary action lubricated by the tear film.
Müller called his development Hornhautlinsen or 'corneal lenses'. His efforts to develop a new corrective lens were ultimately unsuccessful, since a patient could only tolerate the lens bearing down heavily on the sclera for half an hour, less than those of Fick. Moreover, it had to be inserted underwater to prevent trapping air bubbles, and cocaine administered to anaesthetise the eye, but he did however lay the groundwork for later researchers and his ideas and recommendations on fit, tear flow and rounded edges still form the basis for contact lens fitting today.In 1932, Müller donated three lenses to the German Museum in Munich. These were the same lenses that he had discussed in his thesis.

René Charles Joseph Ernest Maire (29 May 1878, Lons-le-Saunier – 24 November 1949) was a French botanist and mycologist. His major work was the Flore de l'Afrique du Nord in 16 volumes published posthumously in 1953. He collected plants from Algeria, Morocco, France, and Mali for the herbarium of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium.

Antonino Lo Surdo (4 February 1880 in Syracuse – 7 June 1949 in Rome) was an Italian physicist. He was appointed as professor of physics at the Istituto di Fisica in Rome in 1919; upon the death of Orso Mario Corbino in 1937, he became the director. Lo Surdo studied terrestrial physics, including seismology and geophysics; the 1908 Messina earthquake caused the death of his parents and other close relatives, except his brother. He contributed to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica under the auspices of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, when its president was Guglielmo Marconi.
His name is remembered for the discovery (made independently by Johannes Stark) in 1913 of the effect on an electric field on the emission spectrum of a gas. This physical phenomenon is called the Stark-Lo Surdo effect in Italy (and is generally known outside Italy simply as the Stark effect). The discovery of the effect was a remarkably important contribution to the development of the quantum theory. Lo Surdo's discovery of the effect led Antonio Garbasso to introduce quantum theory into the Italian universities.

Rocco Jemma (1866–1949) was an Italian pediatrician.