Georg Lotheissen

Georg Lotheissen (1868 to 1941) was an Austrian surgeon who was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He took his medical doctorate in Vienna in 1892 and trained as an assistant to Emil Zuckerkandl and as a surgical apprentice under Theodor Billroth and Carl Gussenbauer. From 1895 to 1901 he served as first assistant to Viktor von Hacker at the surgical clinic in Innsbruck, where he qualified as a university lecturer in surgery in 1899, and in 1902 he returned to Vienna, becoming an associate professor in 1915. His work concerned surgery of the esophagus and the repair of hernias. In 1897 he was the first surgeon to suture the conjoint tendon to Cooper's pectineal ligament, in a patient with a recurrent inguinal hernia, an operation later popularized by the American surgeon Chester McVay and now called the Lotheissen-McVay herniotomy. His name is also attached to Lotheissen's operation, a transinguinal approach to a femoral hernia through the posterior wall of the inguinal canal.