Hermann Oppenheim

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Hermann Oppenheim, ca.1870

Hermann Oppenheim , occasionally also written Oppenheimer (born December 31, 1857 in Warburg , Westphalia, † May 22, 1919 in Berlin ), was a German neurologist and psychiatrist .

Live and act

Hermann Oppenheim is the son of Juda Oppenheim (1824–1891), the long-time rabbi of the Warburg synagogue community , and his wife Cäcilie, née. Steeg (1822-1898). His grandfather Manus Mannes Oppenheim (1784–1844), son of Hirsch Oppenheim , came from Schenklingsfeld in Hesse and was a goods and cattle dealer. The family of his mother Cäcilie had been resident in Warburg for a long time, her grandfather Samuel Gerson Steg (1735-1807) had also been a well-known rabbi and regional judge of Westphalia there. The conductor Hans Oppenheim was his son.

Hermann passed his Abitur at the Marianum Warburg grammar school in 1877 as one of the best in his class. He then studied medicine in Göttingen , Berlin and Bonn , where he was a scholarship holder and student of Nathan Zuntz and received his doctorate in 1881 with an award-winning paper on the physiology and pathology of urea excretion. After his state examination in 1882 and a brief assistantship at the Maison de Santé in Berlin-Schöneberg , he entered the Charité mental hospital under Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal , where he was his assistant from 1883 to 1891.

In 1886 Oppenheim completed his habilitation with a collection of 18 smaller papers in the field of nerve pathology for neurology. He mainly offered lectures on electrical diagnosis and therapy . After he left the Charité after Westphal's death in the summer of 1891, and a request for an extraordinary position, which he had sent to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin in 1891 , was rejected, Oppenheim founded a private clinic at Schiffbauerdamm 25 in Berlin-Mitte , which achieved international rank. When Oppenheim's renewed application for an extraordinary position in 1901 was also rejected, he resigned from the medical faculty in 1902. In his private life he complained that his adherence to Judaism and the refusal to convert would have blocked his way to an academic career. His friend the painter Ernst Oppler made a portrait of him, which was published in an edition of 10.

In his research, through which he significantly promoted the recognition of neurology as a separate discipline and played a major role in its scientific dissemination, Oppenheim devoted himself in particular to diseases after trauma and the new formation of the central nervous system . He became known for his studies on the clinic of the pathological anatomy of the tabes , on multiple sclerosis , on progressive paralysis and on bulbar paralytic phenomena. His theory of psychotraumatic neurosis, which he developed in contrast to Jean-Martin Charcot's theory of hysteria, was particularly controversial. Oppenheim described traumatic neuroses as a disease of its own, which he attributed directly to traumatic experiences. When he took over the management of a military hospital in the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin during the First World War , he also applied this theory to the widespread problem of war tremors . According to his thesis, the mental shocks of the soldiers at the front led to a shaking of the finest parts of the brain. The tremors are therefore the result of the anatomical effects of this 'concussion'. In this way, at least as a neurologist, he represented an outsider position within German psychiatry in the public debate about the war damage to be recognized, insofar as he classified the psychological problems of those affected as a direct consequence of the war, cf. a. Functional Syndromes .

In 1907 Oppenheim was chairman of the Berlin Society for Psychiatry and Neurology . From 1912 to 1916 he was President of the Society of German Neurologists, which he founded . In 1916 he took over the management of the Berlin military hospital for nervous diseases free of charge.

Medical nomenclature

According to Hermann Oppenheim u. a. named the Oppenheim sign or the Oppenheim reflex . It is the flexion of the big toe or the foot towards the back of the foot when the inner, muscle-free edge of the shin is rubbed. This reflex indicates a spinal cord disease (pyramidal tract lesion). He entered the medical nomenclature with the following further clinical pictures and medical terms, the drag-Oppenheim syndrome (Dystonia musculorum deformans), the Oppenheim cerebral palsy, the Oppenheim fress reflex and the Oppenheim gait in multiple sclerosis.

Fonts

  • The traumatic neuroses. Berlin 1889.
  • Textbook of Nervous Diseases. Berlin 1894 (7 editions until 1923, standard work)
  • State of the art of war and accident neuroses. 1918.

literature

  • Heiko Bewermeyer: Hermann Oppenheim - a founder of neurology , Schattauer Verlag , Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-7945-3177-6
  • Katrin Bewermeyer: Hermann Oppenheim: Founder of German neurology: biography based on a new source . Marburg 2004 (dissertation, University of Marburg, 2003).
  • Katrin Bewermeyer, Heiko Bewermeyer, Hans Dieter Mennel: Hermann Oppenheim: Contribution to the life and work history based on a found résumé . In: Series of publications by the German Society for Neurology 10, 2004, pp. 337–351.
  • Paul Lerner: From Traumatic Neurosis to Male Hysteria. The Decline and Fall of Hermann Oppenheim, 1889–1919. in: Mark S. Micale u. Paul Lerner (Ed.): Traumatic Pasts. History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930. Cambridge 2001, pp. 140-171.
  • Anja Pech: Hermann Oppenheim (1858-1919) - life and work of a Jewish doctor . Herzogenrath: Murken-Altrogge, 2007 ( dissertation, University of Hamburg, 2006 ; PDF; 1.5 MB). ISBN 3-935791-24-0 .
  • Hans-Dieter Mennel, Bernd Holdorff, Katrin Bewermeyer u. Heiko Bewermeyer: Hermann Oppenheim and German neurology between 1870 and 1919 . Stuttgart; New York: Schattauer, 2007. ISBN 3-7945-2544-2 .
  • Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Oppenheim, Hermann. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1076.
  • Susanne Zimmermann:  Oppenheim, Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 565 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Oppenheim, Hermann , in: Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Volume 4. Chernivtsi, 1930, p. 659
  • Oppenheim, Hermann , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 288

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oppenheim himself always gave January 1, 1858 as his date of birth. According to the documents in the Detmold civil status register and the Warburg City Archives, he was born on December 31, 1857. Bad luck: Hermann Oppenheim , p. 9.
  2. ^ MyHeritage to Juda Oppenheim
  3. ^ Matthias M. Weber: Shaken nerves. Hermann Oppenheim's concept of traumatic neurosis. In: Psychotherapy. Volume 15, 2010, pp. 205-213.
  4. ^ Oppenheim H .: About traumatic neuroses. According to the observations made in the Charité mental hospital over the past 5 years. A. Hirschwald, Berlin 1889.
  5. ↑ Oppenheim H .: The case N. Another contribution to the doctrine of the traumatic neuroses together with a lecture and some considerations on the same chapter. S. Karger, Berlin 1896.
  6. ^ Uexküll, Thure from : Basic questions of psychosomatic medicine. Rowohlt Taschenbuch, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1963, chap. History of Psychosomatic Medicine, page 17
  7. ↑ Sabine Schuchart: Hermann Oppenheim, a tragic visionary, Deutsches Ärzteblatt vol. 117, issue 16, April 17, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Oppenheim, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oppenheimer, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neurologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Warburg , Westphalia
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1919
Place of death Berlin