Albert Fromme

Albert Bernhard Fromme (born November 25, 1881 in Gießen ; † May 5, 1966 in Holzminden ) was a German surgeon . He is considered to be one of the last universal surgeons before surgery was split up into numerous specialist areas.

family

Albert Fromme - the second eldest of four children - was the son of the physicist Carl Fromme , son of a middle-class official from the Hessian state service. His mother, Henriette Fromme b. Bandmann, came from a wealthy family from Göttingen . The father studied mathematics and physics in Göttingen , received his doctorate at the age of 21, qualified as a professor at the age of 23 and finally became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Giessen .

Life

After one year's voluntary military service Albert Fromme 1905 put the medical state examination at the University of Giessen and was Franz Volhard Dr. med. PhD. During his studies in Gießen in 1900 he became a member of the student union Academic Society Das Kloster . From 1906 to 1921 he worked at the Bacteriological Institute of the University of Göttingen .

At the beginning of the First World War , Albert Fromme was activated as a military doctor; he served as a military doctor in the campaign via Belgium to France . In 1916 he married Helene Loeb, widow of a professor of pharmacology from Göttingen who had a fatal accident as a military doctor on the Western Front at the end of 1914. Loeb's first marriage had a son, Georg Lorenz Loeb, whose Jewish origins hindered Frommes' career after 1933 in his professional career.

Four of Frommes' children (including the journalist Friedrich Karl Fromme ) lived in the western occupation zones , which later became the Federal Republic of Germany . After leaving the service, the Fromme couple obtained approval in 1965 to move to a daughter in the west who lived in Holzminden on the Weser.

Activity as a doctor

Fromme became an assistant to Carl Garrè in Bonn. Albert Fromme received his surgical training from Heinrich Braun and his successor Rudolf Stich , with whom he became senior physician in 1910 . In October 1914, since the Göttingen clinic director Rudolf Stich had also moved in, he was reclaimed for the provisional management of the Göttingen surgical university clinic and at the same time he held the surgical chair there. Fromme alongside continued with the rank of Surgeon- consultant surgeon in the field of XI. Army Corps. In 1915 he was appointed professor .

In 1921 he took over the surgical department of the Dresden-Friedrichstadt City Hospital (350 beds) and continued his scientific work at the same time. In 1943 he was elected chairman of the congress of the German Society for Surgery . He held this office until the first post-war congress in 1949. He renounced the leadership of the congress, which he was entitled to, since this was not possible for him in view of the division of Germany and his residence in the Soviet zone of occupation.

In 1954 the leadership of the GDR decided to set up three medical academies as training centers in order to counter the increasingly noticeable lack of doctors. Fromme successfully campaigned for one of these three academies to be located in Dresden alongside Erfurt and Magdeburg . For the Medical Academy Dresden , Fromme pushed through the name of the doctor, painter and Goethe friend Carl Gustav Carus against the will of the SED , which wanted to be named after the communist Ernst Thälmann . Fromme became a professor and at the same time the first rector of this new university and thus achieved the academic chair which the National Socialists had denied him because of the "half-Jewish" origins of his stepson, whom he had adhered to after his emigration.

Albert Fromme remained in service until 1956. According to the labor law of the GDR, he received a so-called intelligence pension . However, the fortune he had earned had gradually waned. On 13./14. In February 1945, as a result of the Allied air raids on Dresden, he had lost his villa at Altenzeller Strasse 23 in the Südvorstadt with all its inventory, including above all his scientific library and preparatory work for later scientific work. As was common in the Soviet zone, cash was blocked and gradually released after 1948 and revalued according to socialist principles. The property was expropriated without compensation.

Work areas

Abdominal surgery was a focal point of Frommes practical work . He wrote around 90 scientific papers. During the First World War, Frommes was particularly interested in bone surgery . He wrote about problems of osteopalacia , about osteochondritis and he examined in an extensive monograph the phenomenon of late rachitis and the resulting bone changes . Together with Stich he wrote an extensive work on vascular surgery and the surgical treatment of the aneurysm . In 1932 he wrote several chapters for instructions on the early detection of cancer . He was one of the few "all-round surgeons" who had a bacteriological training.

The divergence of surgery into more and more specialist subjects caused Fromme worries. But he was aware that the depth of the exploration must result in a loss of breadth. Fromme was one of the last surgeons to be in control of the entire area opened up at that time. He had a special reputation for operations that required a delicate hand: thyroid , pancreas , and spinal surgery . Fromme was particularly sought after as a surgeon for diseases related to carcinoma , especially in the abdomen , and most recently on the lungs . This leads to Fromme's main scientific work. In 1953 he published a book on The Mesenchyme and the Mesenchyme Theory of Carcinoma . This describes a path that later appeared to be forward-looking: Professor HW Schreiber (Hamburg), President of the Society for Surgery 1982/83, wrote in a letter dated June 15, 1983 that the ideas of pious things had "become modern again".

Among the numerous honors that Fromme received, the most important for him was his election as honorary member of the German Society for Surgery at the 1955 congress. He saw this as a compensation for the fact that post-war conditions had prevented him from leading his “own” congress. He was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR and the Saxon Academy of Sciences . In 1952 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Web links

• Literature by and about Albert Fromme in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature list in the online catalog of the Berlin State Library
• Short portrait of Albert Fromme ( Memento from July 18, 2002 in the Internet Archive )
• Harald Thulin: Albert Fromme (1881–1966) . In: Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (Ed.): Saxon Biography .

Individual evidence

1. ^ German Society for Surgery (ed.): 98th Congress of the German Society for Surgery . Demeter Verlag, Graefelfing / Munich 1981.
2. ↑ The Black Ring. Membership directory. Darmstadt 1930, p. 22.
3. ↑ Hans Killian : Master of surgery . 2nd edition, Thieme, Stuttgart 1980, p. 441.