Victor Eisenmenger

Victor Eisenmenger was an Austrian physician, born in Vienna in 1864 and died in 1932, best remembered for the syndrome that bears his name. He was the son of the portrait painter August Eisenmenger, graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1889, and began as an unpaid assistant surgeon before joining the laryngology clinic of Leopold von Schrötter in 1894. When his health faltered, von Schrötter arranged for him to become personal physician to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a post he held from about 1895 until the archduke was assassinated in 1914; he also attended Charles I of Austria and later wrote a memoir of the archduke that drew criticism over patient confidentiality. In an 1897 article in a German medical journal he described a young man born with a ventricular septal defect who showed a bluish skin colour and clubbed nails. Since the 1950s the name Eisenmenger syndrome has been applied to a congenital heart defect that sends too much blood to the lungs, damages the lung vessels and eventually reverses the flow.