Moritz Litten was a German physician who was a native of Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. He was a son-in-law to pathologist Ludwig Traube

Ludwig Traube (physician)

Ludwig Traube was a German physician and co-founder of the experimental pathology in Germany.-Biography:...

 (1818–1876).

He studied medicine at the Universities of Heidelberg, Marburg and Berlin, and in 1868 earned his medical doctorate. From 1872 to 1876 he worked at the Allerheiligen Hospital in Breslau, and during this time was also an assistant to Julius Friedrich Cohnheim (1839–1884). From 1876 to 1882 he worked in the clinic of Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs

Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs

Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs was a German pathologist who was born in Aurich. After earning his medical degree from the University of Göttingen in 1841, he returned to Aurich and spent the next four years there as an optician...

 at Berlin-Charité

Charité

The Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin is the medical school for both the Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. After the merger with their fourth campus in 2003, the Charité is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe....

, and in 1884 became a titular professor.

Litten is remembered for being the first physician to describe vitreous

Vitreous humour

The vitreous humour or vitreous humor is the clear gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina of the eyeball of humans and other vertebrates...

 bleeding in correlation with subarachnoid hemorrhage

Subarachnoid hemorrhage

A subarachnoid hemorrhage , or subarachnoid haemorrhage in British English, is bleeding into the subarachnoid space—the area between the arachnoid membrane and the pia mater surrounding the brain...

 (SAH). In 1881 he published his findings in Ueber einige vom allgemein-klinischen Standpunkt aus interessante Augenveränderungen (Berl Klin Wochenschr 18: 23– 27). Several years later, French ophthalmologist Albert Terson noticed these symptoms in a patient, and the condition is now known as Terson's syndrome. In 1880 Litten documented one of the earliest known cases of a paradoxical embolism

Paradoxical embolism

A paradoxical embolism is a kind of stroke or other form of arterial thrombosis caused by embolism of a thrombus of venous origin through a lateral opening in the heart, such as a patent foramen ovale....

 in a patient undergoing anaesthesia.

Associated eponym:

• Litten's sign
  Litten's sign
  Litten's sign is a clinical sign in which cotton wool spots are seen on fundoscopic examination of the retina in patients with infective endocarditis.The sign is named after Moritz Litten....
  
  : (Roth's spots) in bacterial endocarditis.

Sources

• Humboldt University

External links

• Zeno.org (translated biography)