Franz König (surgeon)

Monument to Franz König in Charité University Hospital in Berlin

Franz König (February 10, 1832 – December 12, 1910) was a German surgeon. He was born in Rotenburg an der Fulda and died in Grunewald near Berlin.

In 1855 he received his doctorate from the University of Marburg, and was later district wound surgeon (Amtswundarzt) in Hanau. Afterwards he was a professor of surgery at the Universities of Rostock and Göttingen, and eventually the Charité Berlin.

König is largely remembered for his work in bone and joint surgery. He was the first physician to identify the relationship between hemophilia and hemophilic arthropathy, as well as the first surgeon to perform a successful internal fixation of proximal femur fractures. In 1887, Franz König published a paper on the cause of loose bodies in the joint. In his paper, König concluded:^[1]

1. That trauma had to be very severe to break off parts of the joint surface.
2. That lesser degrees of trauma might contuse the bone to cause an area of necrosis which might then separate.
3. That in some cases, the absence of trauma worth mentioning made it likely that there existed some spontaneous cause of separation.

König named the disease "osteochondritis dissecans",^[2] describing it as a subchondral inflammatory process of the knee, resulting in a loose fragment of cartilage from the femoral condyle.

Associated eponym:

• König's syndrome: Various abdominal symptoms caused by an incomplete obstruction of the small intestine.

Notes

References

• Franz König @ Who Named It
• NCBI National Library of Medicine; Proximal Femur Fractures