Hans Conrad Julius Reiter - First World War

First World War

During the First World War, Hans Reiter worked as a military physician on the Western Front and in the Balkans, where he served in the 1st Hungarian Army. It was here in 1916 that he reported a German Lieutenant with non-gonococcal urethritis, arthritis and uveitis. He was not the first person to describe this syndrome, which would later become known as Reiter's syndrome (later renamed to Reactive arthritis when his Nazi affiliation came to light). In the same year, and quite separately, the triad was reported by Feissinger & Leroy, and the triad was first reported by Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie (English surgeon 1783-1862). However, the combination of two of the elements (arthritis and urethritis) had been known from the 16th century. Reiter erroneously thought the triad to be due to a spirochaete related to but distinct from the causative agent of syphilis. This error probably was influenced by his discovery of the spirochaete cause of leptospirosis and a nonpathogenic strain of treponema related to T. pallidum (the cause of syphilis). This "Reiter strain" of treponema enabled drug companies to later develop the "Reiter Complement Fixation Test" for syphilis.