Leo Buerger

Leo Buerger (1879 to 1943) was an Austrian American pathologist, surgeon and urologist, born in Vienna and raised from the age of seven in the United States, where he trained at City College of New York and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and took his medical degree in 1901. From 1907 to 1920 he worked as a pathologist and surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. There, in 1908, he gave the first accurate pathological description of thromboangiitis obliterans, the circulatory disease of the hands and feet that now carries his name and had been reported earlier by Felix von Winiwarter. He also helped develop the Brown-Buerger cystoscope, devised an operating cystoscope, described a bedside test for lower limb ischemia, and wrote more than 160 articles and a book on circulatory disturbances of the extremities.