Kawasaki Syndrome in Germany: Historical Aspects and Current Update

Abstract

Through his analytical powers of observation, the Japanese physician Kawasaki became aware of a rare childhood disease that his colleagues mistook for scarlet fever. Even more than five decades later, there is only conjecture as to the cause, despite intensive research. Kawasaki syndrome even made it into the American blockbuster medical series Dr. House. For the Japanese pediatrician Tomisaku Kawasaki, who was regarded as very modest, it must have come as a great surprise when his name became established in medical circles worldwide at the end of the 1970s as the term for the acute inflammatory disease of the blood vessels in young children that he discovered