Karl Lennert

Karl Lennert (1921 to 2012) was a German physician and pathologist who devoted his career to diseases of the blood-forming tissues, especially malignant lymphomas. Born in Fürth on 4 June 1921, he studied medicine at Erlangen from 1939 to 1945, stayed there as a resident physician in the Institute of Pathology until 1950, and then worked in Frankfurt am Main. In 1963 he took the chair of the Institute of Pathology at Kiel University, where he became professor emeritus in 1989, and he was the founding president of the European Association of Hematopathology. Around 1975 he began the Kiel classification of non-Hodgkin lymphomas, based on the cytomorphological and biochemical features of developing lymphoid cells, and in 1952 he described a variant of peripheral T-cell lymphoma that is now called Lennert lymphoma. He wrote over 300 scholarly papers and four textbooks and died on 27 August 2012.