Bernhard Moritz Carl Ludwig Riedel

Bernhard Moritz Carl Ludwig Riedel (1846 to 1916) was a German surgeon, a native of Teschentin in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg. He graduated from the University of Rostock in 1872 and spent three years as prosector there. In 1875 he became an assistant to Franz König in Göttingen, where he qualified as a lecturer in surgery in 1877, and he went on to study surgery with Bernhard von Langenbeck and Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben. In 1881 he was appointed chief physician of the surgical department at the municipal hospital in Aachen, and in 1888 he became director of the surgical clinic at the University of Jena. Riedel was a pioneer in the surgical treatment of appendicitis and cholecystitis, and in 1888 he performed the first choledochoduodenostomy, joining the common bile duct to the duodenum. His name is attached to Riedel thyroiditis, a rare thyroid disease in which the gland is replaced by fibrosis, which he first described in 1896, and to Riedel's lobe of the liver. He became a member of the Leopoldina in 1888 and chaired the German Society of Surgery in 1907.