Franz König (surgeon)

Franz König was a German surgeon, born in Rotenburg an der Fulda on 10 February 1832 and dying near Berlin on 12 December 1910. The son of a physician, he took his doctorate at Marburg in 1855, worked as a district wound surgeon in Hanau, and then held surgical professorships at Rostock, Göttingen and finally the Charité in Berlin, where he succeeded Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben in 1895. He is remembered chiefly for bone and joint surgery and was the first surgeon to carry out a successful internal fixation of a fracture of the upper femur. In 1887 he published on the origin of loose bodies in joints and named the condition osteochondritis dissecans, and in 1892 he gave a full account of hemophilic arthropathy with three stages. An abdominal syndrome caused by partial small bowel obstruction carries his name.