Friedrich Meggendorfer

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Friedrich Meggendorfer (born June 7, 1880 in Bad Aibling , † February 12, 1953 in Bamberg ) was a German psychiatrist and neurologist . He represented a hereditary biological psychiatry and worked mainly on forensic topics and alcoholism as an indication for forced sterilization according to the " Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Offspring ". In 1930 he documented the familial occurrence of the hereditary form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease . He also led (in collaboration with Adolf dog's mercury ) as the first German psychiatrist in 1939 at his Erlanger Hospital , a electroconvulsive therapy through.

Life

Friedrich Meggendorfer's parents' house in Bad Aibling (right)

Meggendorfer came from a merchant's on her father's side and a doctor's family on her mother's side . After attending primary school in Aibling and secondary school in Traunstein , he left school with the secondary school certificate . He was supposed to become a businessman and stayed as a commercial trainee and to learn foreign languages ​​in Rovereto , Geneva , Paris and London . When the " Boxer Rebellion " broke out in 1901 , he registered as a volunteer and was trained as a one-year volunteer with the 2nd Sea Battalion in Wilhelmshaven , but without coming to China .

In 1903 Meggendorfer succeeded in convincing his father to let him study medicine . After being in 1904 Wuerzburg his high school had taken off, he studied in Munich and Berlin . In 1909 he passed his state examination and received his doctorate in 1910 under Emil Kraepelin . He then worked as a medical intern in Munich-Eglfing , Bad Oeynhausen and Constantinople and in 1911 became an assistant at Kraepelin. In 1913 he moved to Max Nonne at the Eppendorfer Hospital in Hamburg .

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Meggendorfer was assigned to the SMS Ostfriesland as a marine assistant doctor and was later assigned to the Mediterranean Division. Here he worked, among other things, at the German bacteriological investigation center in Constantinople . In his free time he devoted himself to translating ancient medical works from Arabic into German.

In 1918 Meggendorfer returned to Germany and continued his scientific career as a senior physician under Wilhelm Weygandt at the Friedrichsberg State Hospital . Here he completed his habilitation and became a private lecturer on June 21, 1921 . He headed the department for heredity research in Friedrichsberg, which, however, was not expanded into a psychiatric and genetic research facility, as had been promised to him. In 1925 Meggendorfer became an adjunct professor. On June 3, 1927, he became associate professor and spent a few months with the neuroscientist Otfried Foerster in Breslau . He joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 . In 1934 he became full professor for psychiatry and director of the psychiatric and nervous clinic at the University of Erlangen . A recall to Hamburg as Weygandt's successor failed in 1936.

Meggendorfer was released by the military government on August 22, 1945, but remained acting director of the psychiatric and mental hospital in Erlangen. After examining his past, he was reappointed professor on October 15, 1947 and at the same time retired , but was still active in research after his retirement. He was married and had four daughters.

Act

Meggendorfer was an exposed representative of hereditary biology oriented psychiatry. His first publications dealt with the alleged familial and hereditary predisposition to progressive paralysis and claimed an increased incidence of schizophrenia among the relatives of criminals. For research on the clinic and genealogy of " moral insanity " he was on leave in 1921 at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry , where he worked with the director of the genealogical department there, Ernst Rüdin .

From his research, Meggendorfer derived the demand for racial hygiene measures. In 1930 he pleaded for easier divorce if a spouse had a predisposition to inherited mental illness and in 1933 he advocated castration as a therapeutic agent for homosexuality . His work on the indication of alcoholism, in which he not only spoke out in favor of the sterilization of the obviously severe alcoholics, but also wanted to see those “covered by their hereditary burden, their psychopathy,” were significant in the implementation of the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring . Their criminality and their other anti-social nature show that they are carriers of pathological hereditary factors. ”Meggendorfer was a member of the Bamberg Hereditary Health Court .

In 1930 he gave an early description of the familial form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a north German family. The first case had already been described by Kirschbaum in 1924, but Meggendorfer showed that apart from the case described by Kirschbaum, there was an accumulation of other cases in the family.

On December 1, 1939, Meggendorfer carried out the first electroconvulsive therapy in Germany in cooperation with Siemens at the Erlangen Clinic. By the end of May 1940, he reported, 52 patients had been treated with a total of 790 individual applications. The success was short-term. In 1942 Meggendorfer concluded that electroconvulsions were not the ideal therapy for schizophrenia, but that in connection with insulin shock therapy it was the most promising.

Fonts (selection)

  • Experimental investigations of writing disorders in paralytics. Engelmann, Leipzig, Munich 1910.
  • On syphilis in the ascending trend of dementia praecox sufferers. In: German journal for neurology. 51, 1914.
  • About simulating various nervous diseases caused by pituitary tumors. In: German journal for neuropathy. 55 (1-3), 1916, pp. 1-28.
  • Clinical and genealogical research on "Moral Insanity". In: magazine fd ges. Neurology Psychiatry. 66 1921, pp. 208-231.
  • About lethargic encephalitis, sleep and the effects of scopolamine. In: German journal for neuropathy. 68-69, 1921, pp. 159-164.
  • About the course of paralysis. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. 63, 1921, pp. 9-47.
  • On the role of heredity in paralysis. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. 65, 1921, pp. 18-33.
  • Chronic epidemic encephalitis. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. 75, 1922, pp. 89-220.
  • The mental disorders in Huntington's chorea, clinical and genealogical studies. (At the same time notification of 11 new HD families). In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. 87, 1923, pp. 1-49.
  • About cocainism. Neuland-Verlag, Hamburg 1925.
  • with Gottfried Ewald and Berthold Pfeifer: Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten. Julius Springer, Berlin 1928, 1928–30.
  • Clinical and genealogical observations in a case of Jacob's spastic pseudosclerosis. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. 128, 1930, pp. 337-341.
  • Forensic psychiatry. C. Heymann, Berlin 1931. DNB 58068489X .
  • Hereditary results in the rest of medicine. In: Heredity and Racial Hygiene in the Volkish State. 1934, pp. 230-256.
  • To differentiate the pathological feeble-mindedness from the physiological limitation. In: Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry. 154, 1935, pp. 486-498.
  • What is Severe Alcoholism? In: German Medical Weekly. 62, 1936, pp. 9-13.
  • Contributions to judicial psychiatry in the 6th edition by Manfred Bleuler of: Eugen Bleuler . Psychiatry textbook. Springer, Berlin 1937
  • Alcoholism and population. Neuland-Verlagsges, Berlin 1940.
  • Electroconvulsive treatment of psychoses. In: German Medical Weekly. 66, 1940, pp. 1155-1157. doi: 10.1055 / s-0028-1122348
  • General and special therapy of mental and nervous diseases. Scientific Verlagsges, Stuttgart 1950. DNB 453283039 .
  • A case of Algolagnie with remarkable camouflage of behavior. In: The neurologist. 22, 1951, pp. 393-394. PMID 14941158
  • Then and now. Fifty years of schizophrenia; Development of schizophrenia and the treatment of schizophrenia. In: Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift. 94, 1952, pp. 433-439. PMID 14919495

literature

  • Ernst Rüdin : Professor Friedrich Meggendorfer on his 60th birthday. In: Allg. Journal of Psychiatry and its Frontiers. 115, 1940, pp. 207-211.
  • Hendrik van den Bussche (ed.): Medical science in the "Third Reich". Continuity, adaptation and opposition at the Hamburg Medical Faculty . Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-496-00477-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b P. Gambetti, Q. Kong, W. Zou, P. Parchi, SG Chen: Sporadic and familial CJD: classification and characterization. In: Br Med Bull. 66, 2003, pp. 213-239. doi: 10.1093 / bmb / 66.1.213 . PMID 14522861
  2. ↑ Hendrik van den Bussche (Ed.): Medical Science. P. 82f.
  3. ↑ Ida Valeton: God gave me wings . Publishing house Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-8300-0220-3 .
  4. ↑ Astrid Ley (arr.): The professors and lecturers of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg 1743-1960 . Part 2: Faculty of Medicine . Universitätsbund, Erlangen 1999, ISBN 3-930357-30-5 , p. 128 .
  5. ^ German journal for neuropathy. Volume 170, 1953, pp. I-II
  6. ^ Friedrich Meggendorfer: What is severe alcoholism. (1936), cit. after Hendrik van den Bussche (Ed.): Medical Science. P. 234.
  7. ^ Astrid Ley: Forced Sterilization and Doctors. Background and goals of medical practice 1934–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 115.
  8. ^ F. Meggendorfer: Clinical and genealogical observations in a case of Jacob's spastic pseudocosclerosis. In: Z Neurol Psychiatry. 128, 1930, pp. 337-341. doi: 10.1007 / BF02864269
  9. ↑ Thomas C. Baghai, Richard Frey, Siegfried Kasper: electroconvulsive therapy. Clinical and Scientific Aspects . Springer, Vienna 2004, p. 12; Cornelius Borck: brain waves. A cultural history of electroencephalography . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, pp. 253-255.
personal data
SURNAME Meggendorfer, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Aibling
DATE OF DEATH February 12, 1953
Place of death Bamberg