Antoni Leśniowski

Antoni Leśniowski (1867 to 1940) was a Polish surgeon who is credited with some of the earliest published reports of the bowel disorder now known as Crohn's disease. He graduated in medicine from the University of Warsaw in 1890 and studied further in Berlin. From 1892 to 1912 he worked as a surgeon at the Infant Jesus Hospital in Warsaw, where he specialised in urology, yet his most notable papers dealt with inflammatory disease of the intestine. A weekly medical paper, Medycyna, printed his first account of several such cases in May 1903, and three more articles followed in the annals of the Warsaw Medical Association up to 1905. In 1904 he showed a surgical specimen of an inflammatory tumour of the terminal ileum with a fistula to the colon. The disease was described again in 1932 by American gastroenterologists, and the English-language name favours Crohn, but in Poland it is still called Leśniowski-Crohn disease, and the evidence in his cases is suggestive rather than conclusive. He later directed St Anthony Hospital in Warsaw, led a surgical department at the Holy Spirit Hospital, and was professor of surgery at the University of Warsaw from 1919 to 1936. He also wrote a textbook of general surgery.