Adolf Lorenz (medic, 1854)
Adolf Lorenz (born April 21, 1854 in Weidenau , Austrian Silesia ; † February 12, 1946 in Altenberg (municipality of St. Andrä-Wölker near Vienna / Lower Austria )) was an Austrian orthopedist . He was best known for the "bloodless operation" of the congenital hip dislocation . He was the father of the orthopedist and writer Albert Lorenz (1885–1970) and the behavioral scientist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz .
Family and life
Adolf Lorenz came from a simple background. He was born in the back building of an old one-story corner house opposite the district court on the market square of Weidenau (later there was a restaurant there, the "hotel"). His father was a master saddler and operator of a small tavern for the carters in the Silesian country town of Weidenau, who were also serviced by him as a Riemer with repair work , the mother the eldest of four daughters and sister of two sons (the later doctor Eduard and Johann , who later became a father Gregor first became the capitular of the Benedictine monastery of St. Paul in Lower Carinthia ) of the Silesian farmer Ehrlich (A sister of the farmer Ehrlich lived in Paulineberg near Barzdorf , whose husband was a supervisor in the Barzdorf sugar factory. Lorenz spent part of his childhood in this rural idyll) . Adolf Lorenz started school in Weidenau when he was five years old.
Uncle Johann (Father Gregor), who later became abbot of the St. Paul Monastery, gave "Adolfla" the opportunity to attend the collegiate grammar school there (said Father Gregor had promised his sister on her wedding anniversary that her firstborn would have a free place as a student of four classes of the local secondary school and possibly also as a choir boy in St. Paul in the Kronland Carinthia ). At the age of 13 he was supported by his godfather Kluss (whose brother was a section councilor in the Ministry of Education and later supported Adolf Lorenz in applying for a scholarship ) and the wife of his elder, meanwhile Dr. med. doctorate, first brought brother Eduard via Troppau and Vienna to Trofaiach in Upper Styria to the house of Eduard Ehrlich, who had his medical practice there. In September Lorenz then traveled to St. Paul and was accepted there by Father Odilo, " Prelate Augustin" ( Bishop Augustin Duda, who was Abbot and predecessor of Gregor Ehrlich from 1866 to 1897 ) and his uncle Gregor as a Konviktist. Here he was initially an altar boy and a choirboy. Until 1870 he attended the lower grammar school there.
Four years later he came to Lorenz (also called “Lorz” up to the age of 20) at the Obergymnasium, the kk Staatsgymnasium in Klagenfurt, to which teachers had been sent by the St. Pauler Konvikts since 1809, and graduated there in 1874 as an external student . His scar, which ran diagonally across his cheek, came from the iron point of the stick with which he was beaten by the Prefect Father Eberhard, Father Gregor's later candidate for the election of Abbot.
He was able to finance his medical studies in Vienna, among others with the anatomist, councilor and consultant for medical study matters in the Ministry of Education, Karl Langer and Johann Dumreicher , with a Windhag grant and another grant, as well as a position as a private tutor. The anatomy professor Langer initially provided him with a temporary job and, after passing his anatomy exam, a job as a demonstrator of anatomy. Lorenz also gave a private anatomy course, in which he introduced the young doctor of philosophy Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk , who later founded the Czechoslovak Republic, to the basics of anatomy. Shortly before the end of his medical studies, he supported his sick father, who suffered bilateral leg paralysis at the age of 57, with the purchase of a mechanical elevator . A few years earlier, Lorenz's mother had died of the "black leaves" . In the last year of his studies he completed his one-year military service with the more or less precise statistical recording of patient movements and meteorological data. In addition, he continued to work as a demonstrator in the anatomical dissecting room. Lorenz completed his rigorosum in the sixth year of his medical studies and became a "Doctor of All Medicine". Lorenz turned down a position offered by his patron Langer as an anatomy assistant in order to turn to surgery.
On October 5, 1884, Adolf Lorenz married the eldest daughter of Zacharias Konrad Lecher (1829–1905), editor-in-chief of the Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse and first president of the writers' association “Concordia”, Emma Lecher (born January 4, 1862) from Altenberg an der Danube (about 20 km north of Vienna), who was a "loyal assistant" (and "secretary") to him for over 50 years. In 1885 the first son Albert was born, who later also became an orthopedic surgeon and ran a practice with his father. In 1903 his son Konrad-Zacharis was born, who initially feared premature birth or miscarriage.
Work as a surgeon and orthopedist
Until the death of Johann von Dumreicher in 1880, Lorenz worked for a year at his clinic as an operation child. Thereafter, Dumreicher's first assistant, Professor Nikoladoni , temporarily organized or disorganized the clinic. He was succeeded by Professor Eduard Albert from Innsbruck . Lorenz initially worked for Eduard Albert as a "house surgeon" and was soon promoted to clinical assistant, who was also employed as chief deputy. During a scientific leave granted by Albert, which Lorenz received after it became apparent that an allergy to the carbolic acid used for disinfection (and later also an "idiosyncrasy" against any antiseptic ), which caused severe skin damage mainly to the hands, already caused him to work as a surgical assistant To give up "bloody" surgery, Lorenz had written a paper on the static flat foot ( apprenticeship of acquired flat foot in 1883) and sat in on Johann Nepomuk von Nussbaum in Munich (using leather gloves). Inspired by Albert, who recommended Lorenz to switch from "wet" to "dry" surgery because of his hypersensitivity to disinfectants , he became an orthopedic surgeon (in contrast to America, orthopedics in Europe was still at the beginning of its development).
Lorenz specialized in the treatment of congenital hip dislocations and other anatomical malformations (such as the congenital clubfoot) with stretch bandages and plaster molds. He intensified his efforts to correct bone deformations with devices, in particular because of his continuing carbole allergy. To improve his financial situation, Lorenz worked as a "narcositarius" in the private practice of Eduard Albert. Lorenz, called “plaster professor” by his surgical colleagues, then set up his own orthopedic practice and opened it in mid-October, hiring his wife, who had married a week earlier, as his assistant. Lorenz worked in the morning in Albert's clinic and in the afternoon and evening in the practice. In his orthopedic practice, he mainly treated children with scoliosis, but also patients with tuberculosis-related bone and joint ailments, especially children with tuberculous hips. Instead of the American traction method, he used a simpler fixation with a plaster cast, and in the case of tuberculous vertebral inflammation also with a plaster bed, and with this he had great success (the plaster bed was later also used in the treatment and painless transport of spinal injuries from the First World War).
Thanks to this and other spectacular successes, for example with the "modeling redressement" he used and developed for congenital (innate) hip joint dislocations (among other things for the treatment of clubfoot or heel foot), with his newly developed healing method, he was one from 1902 world-famous physician. At the beginning of the First World War, Lorenz received his own department in the hospital, an orthopedic university outpatient clinic with an operating room. From then on he used alcohol instead of carbolic acid for surgical or orthopedic interventions, such as the open reduction of a congenital hip dislocation. In the fall of 1902 he went on a trip to Chicago, where he treated an approximately seven-year-old girl, the daughter of an “industrial king”, with a double-sided hip dysplasia and then operated on in public hospitals as a visiting doctor “in front of a large auditorium”. In addition, he passed an oral medical examination that only authorized him to legally practice his subject as a lecturer in the USA. He passed this license with "cum laude".
He stayed regularly in the USA until the 1930s , where he practiced mainly in New York. A reception was given in his honor in Philadelphia at Jefferson Medical College , where a large hospital was built in 1877. In New York he received a precious book from the former possession of George Washington , presented by Mayor Seth Low , as a thank you gift from the local council. After traveling to New Orleans and Mexico, he worked in Dallas at the beginning of 1903 , where he helped treat hundreds of children from all over Texas at the former Good Samaritan Hospital and was in turn the guest of several receptions organized for him with prominent guests. At the end of May 1903 he traveled on to St. Louis, where he also worked at a hospital and was a guest of the brewer Adolphus Busch . Then he returned to Chicago.
The growing awareness went hand in hand with the appointment as extraordinary professor of the new subject orthopedics by the medical faculty and by Emperor Franz Joseph I, who heard the word "orthopedics" for the first time on this occasion, as a member of the government, the treatment also from overseas (for example Chile) traveled patients and with great wealth. Among his patients was Elisabeth Petznek , the granddaughter of Emperor Franz Joseph. Over time, patients from all over the world came to him.
Twenty kilometers northwest of Vienna, he had a country estate (the "Lorenz Hall") built in Altenberg , the residence of his father-in-law. The sophisticated villa, which was built in a mixture of styles from Italian Renaissance and Art Nouveau , is located in a spacious garden that resembles a somewhat overgrown English park. The writer Karl Schönherr wrote the earth in a small attic room of the house . The second son of Adolf and Emma Lorenz, Konrad Lorenz , grew up in this house and was able to keep a large flock of animals in this garden. This son was born at a time when Adolf was 49 and Emma Lorenz 42 years old. A miscarriage or disability of Konrad-Zacharias feared during pregnancy did not occur (since Adolf Lorenz was in the USA when the news of the pregnancy was announced, he often called his child “American”). In his memoirs, Konrad Lorenz pointed out the fortunate circumstances on which his career as a behavioral scientist was based.
During the First World War , Lorenz lived with his family in Vienna (in a house on Rathausstrasse) and he lost the fortune that he had invested in Austrian war bonds . After the end of the First World War, he practiced together with his son Albert, who had meanwhile also received his doctorate in medicine and was trained as a surgeon, and who was chief physician in a hospital on the Serbian front during the war. a. back in New York (initially in the Murray Hill Hotel, after lengthy negotiations in a large hospital). In New York, with the help of his host Anton Wedl, a New York importer of Austrian textiles from Vienna and treasurer of the New York Aid Committee to Relieve the Plight of German and Austrian Children, he called the "Lorenz Fund for the Relief of the Plight of Vienna Children" into life. Financial support came from Lorenz's friend Georg Semler, among others. After New York he worked in Newark once a week at the City Dispensary and as an operator in Brooklyn at the Kings County Hospital . Lorenz also operated in Detroit.
He forced his son Konrad Lorenz to first complete a medical degree before he was allowed to turn to his real inclination, zoology .
On his return to Vienna, Adolf Lorenz (long dubbed the “father of German orthopedic surgery”) was allocated more rooms when the internal department of the Vienna General Hospital was reduced in size. And at the age of almost sixty, he set up an orthopedic institute there with his former assistant, Professor J. Haß.
The Society of Doctors in Vienna elected Adolf Lorenz an honorary member in 1937. Lorenz had been proposed for the Nobel Prize for the healing of the congenital hip dislocation, but one vote was missing.
Adolf Lorenz is buried in the family cemetery in the local cemetery in St. Andrä-Wölker .
memory
- Adolf-Lorenz-Gasse in Hietzing (1959)
- Adolf-Lorenz-Gasse in Altenberg
- Memorial plaque on the Rathausstrasse building (Vienna) 21
- Memorial plaque made of marble with relief image (made by the Silesian sculptor Josef Obeth ) on Lorenz's birthplace on the market square in Weidenau (August 18, 1935)
literature
- Adolf Lorenz: I was allowed to help. My life and work. (Translated and edited by Lorenz from My Life and Work. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York) L. Staackmann Verlag, Leipzig 1936; 2nd edition ibid. 1937.
- Albert Lorenz: When the father with the son, memories of Adolf Lorenz. Verlag Franz Deuticke, Vienna 1965 (paperback: dtv ISBN 3-423-20227-0 , new edition 1999)
- Norbert Steingress: Adolf Lorenz 1854–1946. Stages of a long life . Publishing house of the Vienna Medical Academy, Vienna 1997.
- Markwart Michler : Lorenz, Adolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , pp. 174-177 ( digitized version ).
- A. Lorenz: Lorenz Adolf. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 5, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1972, p. 314 f. (Direct links on p. 314 , p. 315 ).
Web links
- Literature by and about Adolf Lorenz in the catalog of the German National Library
- Adolf and Albert Lorenz Memorial, 1010 Vienna, Rathausstraße 21
- Adolf Lorenz Association: Adolf Lorenz 1854 - 1946 .
Individual evidence
- ^ The faculty of the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, Vienna 1908-1910 . Photo credits: Collections of the Medical University of Vienna - Josephinum, picture archive; Associated personal identification .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v Adolf Lorenz: I was allowed to help. My life and work. 1937.
- ↑ Gerold Holzer : Lorenz, Adolf. 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. 864.
- ^ Archives of the Society of Doctors in Vienna. Board meetings. Minutes from November 12, 1937 . Vienna 1937, p. 83-85 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lorenz, Adolf |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian orthopedist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 21, 1854 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Weidenau , Austrian Silesia |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 12, 1946 |
| Place of death | Altenberg, St. Andrä-Wölker |