Viktor Schmieden

Viktor Schmieden was a German surgeon, born in Berlin on 19 January 1874 and died on 11 October 1945. He earned his medical doctorate at the University of Bonn in 1897, worked in hospitals in Göttingen, Berlin and Bonn, and later held professorships at the Universities of Halle from 1913 and Frankfurt from 1919. He is remembered for working with Franz Volhard to establish pericardectomy as a treatment for constrictive pericarditis, a procedure once called Schmieden's operation. He also contributed to the treatment of hydrocephalus and in 1926 identified that polyps of the colon are a precursor of colorectal cancer. During World War II he served as a Generalarzt in the Wehrmacht.