Würzburger Medizinhistorische Mitteilungen

This paper describes cases of ergotismus convulsivus (the kind of poisoning from ergotized grain marked by convulsions), some of them fatal, in the year 1738. The origins of the formation of the ergotized grain as well as the symptoms of ergotism are presented. Comparisons to other epidemics of ergotism are drawn.

The ground plans of the military hospitals in legionary fortresses up to the end of the 1st century AD are described. During that period the design of these valetudinaria was brought to maturity. Assuming that the interpretation as valetudinarium is correct, general requirements for hospitals allow evaluating the functionality and efficiency of these buildings. Especially water supply, heating, building hygiene, and living conditions in the wards are discussed. This approach on the one hand confirms the interpretation of these ground plans as those of valetudinaria, on the other hand it gives us a new realistic assessment of the conditions under which interns, nursing services and patients alike worked and lived in such a valetudinarium...

Around 1800 there arose a need in German university towns for patients to serve as subjects during the practical instruction of academic physicians. Since the early university hospitals could not provide enough patients for the practical training, the Poliklinische Institut (outpatient departments) whose doctors and nurses visited the patients in their home offered an economical alternative to the in-patient therapies. Patients from the lower social classes who could not pay for medical care had to offer themselves as "teaching objects" in return for receiving free treatment...

Historiarum libri decem, a work written by St. Gregory, the bishop of Tours, is an important contemporary source for the study of the Merovingian times. In Book V 42 Gregory reports the story of Maurilio, the bishop of Cahors in the Southern Gaul, who was strongly suffering from gout. Maurilio treated the illness himself applying a hot iron to his foot and shank. This therapy is already mentioned in the Corpus Hippocraticum. It seems, however, that cauterization was not known to St. Gregory of Tours as a medical treatment of this particular illness...

Opened in 1789, the Bamberg General Hospital has often been described as a mile stone on the road from the traditional hospital into an institution for the exclusive care of curable diseases. As this paper shows, however, the shift was much less clear-cut. Early plans for the hospital also envisaged several rooms for dying patients within the new building, and later its first medical director, Adalbert F. Marcus, explicitly demanded that also some incurable patients be admitted and assisted until their death...

As European colonization spread widely over the African continent the health and physical welfare of the African population gained more and more importance to European colonists who concentrated on capitalizing on African human resources for an improved financial and economic outcome of their colonies. This brought tropical medicine to the top of the European colonial agenda and raised the awareness of the threat of infectious diseases, such as the African Trypanosomiasis or so-called sleeping disease. In 1916 a group of scientists from the pharmaceutical company Bayer AG discovered a substance on the base of dye rather than arsenic...

Pierre Janet (1859-1947) is one of those more or less forgotten authors whose approach differed significantly from Freud's psychoanalysis. In the first part of this paper, Janet's conception of hysteria is discussed and his place in French psychiatry described. Different aspects of Janet's diathesis-stress-approach are presented (particularly his important pathogenic concept of fixed ideas) which refer not only to a conception of hysteria, but also to traumatic (stress) disorders and other psychological disturbances...

Reviewing recent pages on social studies of science, the authors found several articles dealing with Dr. Ludwik Fleck's philosophical work. Fleck's interest was even more intensive in medical science. Apart from the typhus serology; he worked extensively in the field of microbiology and described the "Leukergy" phenomenon. A modest contribution was recently added to this list, dealing with Fleck's scientific legacy, namely his contribution to the early diagnosis of infectious diseases. Presented as "Fleck's hypothesis", an outline was given on antigens in the urine of patients with typhus exanthematicus, a disease that needed an early diagnosis or a preventative vaccination...

This article for the first time provides an edition and commentary of the letters of Friedrich Ratzel to his older colleague, teacher and mentor, Ernst Haeckel, which are kept in the archive of the Ernst-Haeckel-House (memorial museum) in Jena. Altogether fifteen letters and one postcard are presented. Haeckel's letters to Ratzel are considered to be lost. The edition is prefaced with a detailed description of Ratzel's life, career and work, as a part of the edition.

The following article gives you a review to the life and work of the military surgeon and ophthalmologist Johann Adam Schmidt who was born in Aub/Lower Franconia on the 12th of October 1759. He had got his surgical education in Würzburg and had worked as an Unterchirurgus in the War of the Bavarian succession. Later on he completed his education in Vienna where he, by joining different work places, had been appointed to a professorship at the Medico-Surgical Joseph's Academy and became a leading figure of the Austrian military medical service...

The question of how medicine represents and documents malfunctions and deviances of human posture and movement is intrinsically linked to the problem of how those occurrences, which can be seen as the end result of medical treatment and manipulations, could be identified and classified. In fact, the relation of posture and movement is reciprocally interconnected: The "normality" of either state cannot be established or clinically reproduced without knowledge of the other. Both conditions of posture and movement serve as reference points for each other and help to distinguish between the dynamics of physiology and illness over the course of time...

The prominent philosopher, theologian, physician, musicologist and organ soloist Albert Schweitzer (14. 1. 1875-4. 9. 1965) submitted his MD thesis Kritik der von medizinischer Seite veröffentlichten Pathographien uber Jesus (Criticism of the medical pathographies on Jesus) in 1913. Very soon he published this work under the title Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu. Darstellung und Kritik (The psychiatric evaluation of Jesus. Description and criticism) in order to reach a broader audience. Schweitzer's explicit motive for selecting this topic was to influence the theological debate by means of a M...

The study of health and healing gods may offer significant examples of how certain ideas survive, with hardly any substantial loss, across periods of great change. It is no surprise that, following centuries of struggle by early Christians against the worship of pagan gods, some originally heathen ideas and elements of thinking should have been in due course, if with prudence, adapted to Christian needs and sensibilities. A most remarkable instance of such practice is to be found, somewhat surprisingly, in the life of the bishop St...

In 1964, the Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Hamburg was abolished finally. So anti-Darwinian biology disappeared from German universities at last. Its founder Jakob von Uexkiill had died in 1944, his biological concepts were proven outdated in the 1940s, too. His students were unable to establish a new anti-Darwinian biophilosophy, but went on in physiological research. They had a choice between changing sides or being doomed. Most of them decided for the latter way, except for Uexkiill's own son Thure, who modernized his fathers concepts and introduced them into psychosomatic medicine...

Uwe Tellkamp's novel Der Turm. Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land (The Tower. A Story From a Lost Land) tells the story of a physician's family in Dresden during the last seven years of the GDR's existence. Crucial in this narration of this family, the Hoffmanns, are the medical aspects. I'm particularly interested in how various concepts of clinical diagnostics and therapies are introduced and linked to specific characters, respectively. While the physicians of the Hoffmann family follow a traditional and rather conservative notion of their profession and use orthodox medical methods, the novel presents a number of figures that are linked to alternative complementary healing methods...

When the French patent law of 1791 was introduced, the ancient discussion about the division of the pharmaceutical market was sparked off again and fuelled the competitive conflict between doctors and non-legitimized healers. Friedericke Burtz was one of those who followed the spirit of times. But Friedericke Burtz failed to consider that the so called Publikandum zur Ermunterung des Kunstfleisses patented only inventions, but not discoveries from nature. As invention was only accepted under Prussian legislation what did not exist in nature yet...

The paper presents biographical data of a total of 84 medical students at the University of Marburg during the first two decades of the 17th century. Of these 73 studied between 1608 and 1620, however, when the faculty had a till now unnoticed flowering caused by a new beginning which centred on modern chymiatric medicine and made the Marburg University attractive especially for non-Hessian and foreign students of medicine. Apart from matricles and doctorates, the analysis focuses on sources of information relevant to the length of stay at the Marburg faculty...

Passionate collectors of anatomical specimens, curiosities and surgical instruments the electors of Saxony between 1560 and 1748 founded great collections of this matter. They struggled for knowledge of nature, of the human body and of diseases. The exhibits were used by members of the court, by citizens and by the students of the first surgical school of Dresden, the Collegium medico-chirurgicum, and its successor. A selection of human and animal bones, fetuses, specimens in alcohol, abnormalities and medical instruments are described by original papers...

In his role as leading SS dentist in the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau Dr. Willy Frank was involved in the worst crimes of World War II: In the early summer of 1944 the so called "Hungarian Action" commenced. It planned the extermination of around 450 000 Hungarian Jews within only a few months. Some twenty years later he was sentenced during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials to seven years of imprisonment on grounds of his participation in the selection and gassing of the Jews. Before that he had been able to resume his professional worksince 1947 unchecked...

Probably in the 60s of the 13th century Albert the Great (dagger 1280) terminated his De animalibus libri XXVI, mainly a commentary on Aristotle's Animals but a milestone in medieval zoology. In the extensive chapter De falconibus of the 23rd book, which was written around 1250 and is probably the oldest part of the whole treatise, Albert used medieval tracts on birds of prey as source material. In the article one of these tracts, the anonymous Tractatus de austuribus on the healing of hawks, is analysed and for the first time presented in a critical synoptic edition (after the Codex unicus Bethesda [MD, USA], National Library of Medicine, 73, fol...