Friedrich Wegener

Friedrich Wegener (1907-1990) was a German pathologist who is notable for his description of a rare disease. Although this disease was known before Wegener's description, since the 1950s it has been called by the name Wegener's granulomatosis.

Wegener joined the Nazi Party in 1932. As a relatively high ranking military doctor he spent some of the war in a medical office three blocks from the Lodz Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland. There is speculation that he participated in experiments on concentration camp inmates.

The American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) awarded Wegener a “master clinician” prize in 1989. After his Nazi past was discovered in 2000, the ACCP rescinded the prize and, separately, a campaign was begun to rename Wegener's granulomatosis to ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis .cite web
url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/22dise.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
title=A Nazi Past Casts a Pall on Name of a Disease
first=Barnaby J.
last=Feder
publisher=The New York Times
date=2008-01-22]

References