Ludwig Aschoff

Karl Albert Ludwig Aschoff (1866 to 1942) was a German physician and pathologist, considered one of the most influential pathologists of the early twentieth century and regarded as the most important German pathologist after Rudolf Virchow. Born in Berlin, he studied medicine at Bonn, Strasbourg and Würzburg, and after his habilitation in 1894 became professor of pathology at Göttingen in 1901, moved to Marburg in 1903 and from 1906 held a chair at Freiburg until his death. He studied the pathology of the heart and discovered the nodules in the myocardium found in rheumatic fever, called Aschoff bodies. With his student Sunao Tawara he described the atrioventricular node, known as the Aschoff-Tawara node. His reputation drew students from around the world, and by the early twentieth century 23 of 26 Japanese pathological institutes were headed by his students. His son Jürgen Aschoff helped found chronobiology. The source also records that his idea of a pathology of constitution was taken up by Nazi doctors as military pathology.