Felix von Winiwarter

Felix von Winiwarter was an Austrian physician, born in Vienna in 1852 and died in 1931. He earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1876 and stayed on as an assistant in the clinic of Heinrich von Bamberger. He then became a surgical apprentice to Theodor Billroth and from 1878 to 1881 worked as a secondary physician under Leopold Ritter von Dittel. In 1881 he became hospital director at the Landesklinikum Weinviertel in Hollabrunn. He was the younger brother of Alexander von Winiwarter, who also spent part of his career working with Billroth. He is credited with an early description of thromboangiitis obliterans: in 1879 he reported a 57-year-old man whose leg arteries and veins were unusually obliterated, attributed it to new tissue growth from the intima and proposed the name endarteritis obliterans. Because Carl Friedländer and later Leo Buerger also described the condition, it is known as Winiwarter-Buerger syndrome, Buerger disease or thromboangiitis obliterans.