Hans Reiter (physician)

Hans Reiter was a German physician, born near Leipzig in 1881, who studied medicine at Leipzig and Breslau and received a doctorate from Tübingen on tuberculosis. He then studied at the hygiene institute in Berlin, the Pasteur Institute in Paris and St Mary's Hospital in London. As a military physician in the First World War he treated soldiers with Weil's disease and made the notable discovery that one of its causative bacteria was Leptospira icterohaemorrhagica. In 1916 he described a disease with the symptoms urethritis, conjunctivitis and arthritis, which became known as Reiter's syndrome. He later became an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi regime and conducted medical experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp. He died in 1969.