1902 deaths

Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin (Cérilly 26 August 1823 – 18 February 1902 Nice) was a French painter, printmaker, and writer. Desboutin always signed himself Baron de Rochefort.

Taco Mesdag (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtaːkoː ˈmɛzdɑx]; Groningen, 21 September 1829 – Den Haag, 4 August 1902) was a Dutch banker and painter.
Mesdag, son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and Johanna Willemina, worked with his younger brother Henry in the banking business of his family. Like his brother Hendrik Mesdag, he eventually also chose to paint as a profession. Together they played an important part in the Hague School Pulchri Studio, where Hendrik served as president and Taco as treasurer.
He was taught by Paul Gabriël, among others. Mesdag is best known as the painter of the landscape of Drenthe. Much of his work was donated by his widow, Geesje Mesdag-van Calcar, to the Groninger Museum.
On the Internet, many of his works are displayed in the Webmuseum Mesdagvancalcar.

Dr. Noël Eugène Ballay (14 July 1847 – 26 January 1902) was a French auxiliary doctor of the French navy, and a poet.
He was an explorer and colonial administrator, the second Governor-General of French West Africa.

Max Schede (7 January 1844 – 31 December 1902) was a German surgeon born in Arnsberg.
Schede studied medicine at the Universities of Halle, Heidelberg and Zurich, obtaining his medical doctorate in 1866. After serving as a doctor in the Austro-Prussian War, he became an assistant to Richard von Volkmann (1830-1889) at Halle. During the Franco-Prussian War, he was in charge of a Feldlazaretts. In 1875, he appointed head of the surgical department at Friedrichshain Hospital in Berlin, and from onward 1880, he practiced surgery at St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg.
At Hamburg he was a catalyst towards the construction of Eppendorf Hospital, becoming head of its surgical department in 1888. In 1895 he was chosen professor of surgery at the University of Bonn. Schede was a pioneer of antisepsis in Germany.
In 1890 he introduced a surgical procedure called thoracoplasty, an operation involving resection of the thorax for treatment of chronic empyema. His name is associated with the "Schede method", also known as "Schede's clot", a procedure that involves scraping off dead tissue in bone necrosis, allowing the cavity to fill with blood, then covering it with gauze and rubber.In 1874 he was a co-founder of the journal "Zentralblatt für Chirurgie".

Clémence Royer (21 April 1830 – 6 February 1902) was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Agnes Mathilde Wesendonck (née Luckemeyer; 23 December 1828 – 31 August 1902) was a German poet and author. The words of five of her verses were the basis of Richard Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder; the composer was infatuated with her, and his wife Minna blamed Mathilde for the break-up of their marriage.

Hervé Auguste Étienne Albans Faye ((1814-10-01)1 October 1814 – (1902-07-04)4 July 1902) was a French astronomer, born at Saint-Benoît-du-Sault (Indre) and educated at the École Polytechnique, which he left in 1834, before completing his course, to accept a position in the Paris Observatory to which he had been appointed on the recommendation of M. Arago. It was during his time at the École Polytechnique that he developed his interest in astronomy.He studied comets, and discovered the periodic comet 4P/Faye on 22 November 1843. His discovery of "Faye's Comet" attracted worldwide attention, and won him the 1844 Lalande Prize and a membership in the French Academy of Sciences. In 1848 he became an instructor in geodesy at the Polytechnique, and in 1854 rector of the academy at Nancy and professor of astronomy in the faculty of science there. Other promotions followed in succeeding decades. He became Minister of Public Instruction in the Rochebouet cabinet in 1877, a position which he held only briefly.
Faye served as the President of the Société Astronomique de France (SAF), the French astronomical society, from 1889 to 1891. He also served as president of the International Geodetic Association from 1892 to 1902.His work covered the entire field of astronomical investigation. It comprised the determination of comet periods, the measurement of parallaxes, and the study of stellar and planetary movements. He also studied the physics of the sun. He advanced several original theories on the nature and form of comets, meteors, the aurora borealis, and the sun.

Frank Richard Stockton (April 5, 1834 – April 20, 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century.