Karl Wilhelm Ernst Joachim Schönborn (May 8, 1840 - 1906) was a German surgeon who was a native of Breslau.
He studied medicine at the Universities of Breslau, Heidelberg, Göttingen and Berlin, and in 1863 received his medical doctorate. At Berlin he became an assistant to Robert Ferdinand Wilms (1824-1880) at Bethanien Hospital, and to Bernhard von Langenbeck (1810-1887) at the University hospital. In 1871 he became a professor at the University surgical clinic at Königsberg, and from 1886 until his death in 1906 he was a professor of surgery at the University of Würzburg.
Schönborn is remembered for his surgical work involving velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI), commonly referred to as cleft palate. In 1875 he described the first true pharyngeal flap surgery, which was an inferiorly based flap surgery for VPI. He would perform several of these operations in the following years, and in 1886 switched to a superiorly based flap operation. He described these procedures in Ueber eine neue Methode der Staphylorrhaphie (1875), and Vorstellung eines falle von Staphyloplastik (1886).