Hans (Paulus) Feriz (born Hans Feischl) (1895 – 1970) was an Austrian-Dutch physician and amateur archaeologist specialised in American archaeology. He spent most of his professional life in the Netherlands. Since the late 1940s he carried out excavations in South and Central America and donated numerous objects he had found to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam (today part of the National Museum of World Cultures). Most of the museum's pre-Columbian collection can be traced back to him.
Birth and family background Hans Feriz was born as Hans Feischl on 23 August 1895 in Vienna, Austria. Feriz married on 17 May 1926 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the four years younger Leonie Catharina Hermine Wilde who was born in Haarlem, The Netherlands, to parents of Dutch and Prussian descent. In the marriage register, Feriz' parents appear under their new last name "Feriz".
Studies and professional career as a surgeon He studied medicine in Vienna, Göttingen, Cologne, Munich, and Amsterdam, graduating as a medical doctor at Munich in 1921 on a topic of pathological anatomy. After World War I, he emigrated to the Netherlands, where he worked as an assistant to Prof. Willem Marius de Vries at the University of Amsterdam from 1921 to 1923. In 1923 he became a resident assistant at the surgical clinic of the famous surgeon Prof. Otto Lanz, who was also a well-known art collector. In 1930, he was admitted as privat-docent of surgical pathology. After Lanz' death in 1935, Feriz continued to teach pathological anatomy at the University of Amsterdam for five more years while establishing himself as a surgeon with his own practice, to which he dedicated himself exclusively after leaving the university in 1940. Occasionally, Feriz worked as a ship's doctor which led him to travel to the Americas. During his time as a research assistant, Feriz published various articles in pathological anatomy and occasionally continued to publish in medical journals until the 1940s. In 1926, he was the first one to publish about macrodystrophia lipomatosa, a rare congenital non-hereditary disorder.
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