Friedrich Wegener (born 1907 in Varel – July 9, 1990, Lübeck) was a German pathologist who is notable for his description of a rare disease. Although this disease was known before Wegener's description, since the 1950s it has been called by the name Wegener's granulomatosis.
Wegener joined the Nazi Party in 1932. As a relatively high-ranking military doctor, he spent some of World War II in a medical office three blocks from the Lodz Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland. There is speculation that he participated in experiments on concentration camp inmates.
The American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) awarded Wegener a “master clinician” prize in 1989. After his Nazi past was discovered in 2000, the ACCP rescinded the prize and, separately, a campaign was begun to rename Wegener's granulomatosis to ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis. More recently, several journals proposed the name 'granulomatosis with polyangiitis' in a 2011 editorial.
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“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)