Otto Wilhelm Madelung

Otto Wilhelm Madelung (1846 to 1926) was a German surgeon, born in Gotha. He took his medical doctorate at the University of Tübingen in 1869 and was then assigned to a military hospital during the Franco-Prussian War. He served as a surgical assistant in Bonn, worked in 1873 and 1874 at the pathological clinic of Georg Eduard von Rindfleisch, and in 1874 visited Great Britain and the United States. He became an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Bonn in 1881, then held professorships at Rostock from 1882 and Strasbourg from 1894. When Strasbourg passed to France after the First World War he was relieved of his duties and retired to Göttingen, where he died. He is remembered for the first comprehensive clinical description of the forearm deformity that bears his name, Madelung's deformity, and for describing a benign symmetric lipomatosis of the neck and upper trunk, also called Madelung's syndrome. He specialized in abdominal surgery and did pioneering work on intestinal anastomoses and laparotomy. His son Erwin Madelung was the physicist who discovered the Madelung constant.