Albrecht von Graefe

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Albrecht von Graefe
Albrecht von Graefe, 1865

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Albrecht von Graefe (born May 22, 1828 in Berlin ; † July 20, 1870 there ) was a German ophthalmologist, royal Prussian secret medical adviser and full professor of ophthalmology at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . In Germany he founded the field of ophthalmology or ophthalmology , which until then belonged to surgery.

origin

The coat of arms of the Graefe family (1826)

Albrecht von Graefe comes from a Saxon family and was the son of the royal Prussian secret medical councilor and general staff doctor of the army Karl von Graefe (1787–1840), full professor of medicine and surgery, and founding director of the surgical clinic at the University of Berlin, and his wife Auguste von Alten (1797-1857). Father Karl was only on the 2nd / 14th. February 1826 in Saint Petersburg was raised to the Polish hereditary nobility with Prussian nobility recognition on November 16, 1826 in Berlin.

Graefe's birthplace was the Villa Finkenherd in Berlin-Tiergarten , built in 1824 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel , which from 1880 housed the famous “Charlottenhof” restaurant and in 1943 fell victim to the bombs of the Second World War . In 1970, on the occasion of the centenary of Albrecht von Graefes' death, a memorial stele was erected in its place . May 22, 1828, d. July 20, 1870 ”.

Life

Star knife according to Graefe

Graefe attended the French grammar school and from 1843 studied medicine, mathematics, physics and chemistry in Berlin. His teachers included Lukas Schönlein , Emil du Bois-Reymond , Rudolf Virchow and Johann Christian Jüngken. From Graefes dissertation with the title De bromo ejusque praesipuis praeparatis he wrote in Latin in 1847 with Johannes Müller . He then worked as an assistant doctor in Prague , where he began to devote himself entirely to ophthalmology. Graefe mentions Ferdinand von Arlt as his first teacher in the field of ophthalmology , whom he first met in Prague in autumn 1848.

He studied further in Paris, Vienna and London and returned to Berlin in 1852, where he completed his habilitation and opened a private eye clinic with 120 beds, which soon enjoyed world fame both in practice and in research. During the treatment Graefe was extremely socially minded, as he made no distinction with regard to social class - not least because of this, his student Julius Hirschberg called him an "apostle of suffering humanity" in an obituary.

Two years later, in 1854, he founded the "Archive for Ophthalmology", the first specialist ophthalmic journal. Together with the Austrian ophthalmologist Ferdinand von Arlt and the Dutch physiologist Frans Cornelis Donders , Graefe acted as editor. He also wrote numerous academic articles. He brought the emerging ophthalmology into connection with other medical disciplines by discovering the connections between eye disorders and internal or neurological diseases such as diabetes mellitus, kidney disease or brain tumors. In 1858 Graefe was elected a member of the Leopoldina . 1866 Graefe director was the ophthalmic department of the Charité and was particularly successful in the treatment of glaucoma and he previously studied squint (strabismus). The surgical technique developed by Graefe, "modified linear extraction method", of cataracts was the basis for the surgical methods of this disease until the 1960s. Until then, the narrow star knife he introduced, the "Graefe knife", was used to open the eye. He is said to have performed more than 10,000 eye operations. Various technical terms bear the name of the physician, such as the "Graefe syndrome", the "Graefe spot" or the "Graefe reflex". The consistent use of the ophthalmoscope developed by Helmholtz can also be traced back to him. In 1857 the first congress of what would later become the "German Ophthalmological Society" (so named from 1920) took place in Heidelberg, which was initiated by Graefe.

Albrecht von Graefe died of pulmonary tuberculosis in Berlin in 1870 at the age of only 42. He was buried in Cemetery II of the Jerusalem and New Churches in front of the Hallesches Tor . He rests there by the side of his wife Anna, nee. from Knuth. The graves of his parents and his maternal grandfather are also nearby. A dark stele with a triangular gable, which stands on a granite base, serves as the gravestone. On the front is a marble relief tondo, which shows the Graefe couple in profile, a work by the sculptor Bernhard Afinger from 1874. On the grave stele there is the inscription: It is the light, sweet and lovely to look at the sun.

family

Albrecht von Graefe married on June 7, 1862 in the Heilandskirche in Sacrow near Potsdam Anna Countess Knuth (House Conradsborg) (born March 15, 1842 in Frederiksborg , Denmark ; † March 22, 1872 in Nice , southern France ), the daughter of the royal Danish Chamberlain and bailiff Count Hans Schack Knuth and Frederikke de Løvenørn. The couple had five children, two of whom died early:

  • Anna Frederike Auguste (born June 21, 1863 - † December 19, 1939) ⚭ June 28, 1890 Erich Svantus von Bonin , captain
  • Ottilie Wanda Blinda (born January 5, 1865 - † August 20, 1865)
  • Olga (June 18, 1866; † November 11, 1949) ⚭ May 11, 1887 Maximilian von Mitzlaff, Rittmeister
  • Karl Albrecht (1868–1933) Member of the Reichstag ⚭ Freiin Sophie von Blomberg (* October 6, 1874; † January 11, 1938)
  • Ernst Max (* July 2, 1869 - † July 13, 1869)

Honors and monuments

  • Installation of a marble bust of Albrecht von Graefe, created by Alexander Gilli , in the university auditorium in 1873 (art collection of the Humboldt University in Berlin).
  • Bronze bust in the eye clinic of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
  • As early as 1875, only five years after the doctor's death, "Street No. 7" in Berlin-Kreuzberg was named Graefestrasse , which in turn gives its name to the surrounding Graefekiez . The street is in the "Professorenviertel" near the Am Urban hospital.
  • A medallion by A. von Graefe is attached to the building of the former Hirschberg Eye Clinic at Reinhardtstrasse 34 in Berlin-Mitte . A memorial plaque on the house of his former eye clinic at Karlstrasse 46, today Reinhardtstrasse. 58, has been removed.
  • By resolution of the Berlin Senate , the last resting place of Albrecht von Graefe in Cemetery II of the Jerusalem and New Churches (grave site 211-EB-69) in Berlin-Kreuzberg has been dedicated as an honor grave of the State of Berlin since 1956 . The dedication was extended in 2016 by the usual period of twenty years.
  • Installation of a marble bust by Albrecht von Graefes donated by the family in the operating room of the University Eye Clinic in 1882 (art collection of the Humboldt University in Berlin).
  • In Berlin-Mitte there is a memorial for the doctor, which, after an initiative of the Berlin Medical Society in 1872, with financial and logistical help from Franz Mendelssohn and with worldwide donations, was created in 1882 based on designs by Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden . The central figure comes from the sculptor Rudolf Leopold Siemering . The memorial originally stood in the Charité garden and is now in front of the clinic on the corner of Luisenstrasse and Schumannstrasse, just a few steps away from the memorial to the founder of modern pathology, Rudolf Virchow . After being damaged, the monument was restored after World War II. The bronze sculpture pays tribute to Albrecht von Graefe with the two-part inscription:
    O, a noble heavenly gift is the light of the eye - all beings live from light.
    Every happy creature - the plant itself joyfully turns to the light.
  • The Graefe Medal is one of the highest honors in ophthalmology and only takes place every 10 years. The medal was designed by the sculptor Ferdinand Hartzer .
  • The Würzburg ophthalmologist Robert Ritter von Welz , who was a close friend of Albrecht von Graefe , founded the von Graefeschen Prize in 1874 . Since it has since expired, it has been revived as the von Graefe Prize by donations from German ophthalmologists and the Rheinisch-Westfälischer Augenärzte association and is awarded every 2 years by the DOG .
  • In the Hansaviertel there is a memorial by the sculptor Edzard Hobbing , donated on the 100th anniversary of his death by the association "German Ophthalmologists"
  • Since September 2015 the school in the street named after Graefe in Berlin-Kreuzberg has been called the Albrecht-von-Graefe-Schule.

literature

Web links

Commons : Albrecht von Graefe  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Archives for Ophthalmology  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: Gräfe and the Max Ring Eye Clinic  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Albrecht von Graefe Medal and its background , website of the Berlin Medical Society, accessed on October 17, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c d Sabine Fahrenbach: Albrecht von Graefe , in: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the present . 3. Edition. Springer Verlag Heidelberg / Berlin / New York 2006, pp. 141–142. Medical glossary 2006 , doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .
  3. ^ Frank Krogmann: Ferdinand von Arlt (1812-1887) under the aspect of his relationships with German scientists. In: Würzburger medical history reports , Volume 13, 1995, pp. 59–66; here: p. 60 f.
  4. ^ Albrecht von Graefe: Contributions to the theory of strabismus and of the strabismus operation. In: Graefes Archive for Ophthalmology. Volume 3, 1957, pp. 177-286.
  5. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , pp. 230, 232.
  6. ^ Cemetery I and II of the Jerusalem and New Churches . Description of the cemetery and the tomb in the database of the Berlin State Monuments Office; accessed on March 26, 2019.
  7. ↑ Graefestrasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  8. ↑ https://www.gedenkenafeln-in-berlin.de/nc/gedenkenafeln/verschwunden/person/358/
  9. ↑ Honorary graves of the State of Berlin (as of November 2018) . (PDF, 413 kB) Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate Protection, p. 27; accessed on March 26, 2019. Recognition and further preservation of graves as honor graves of the State of Berlin . (PDF, 205 kB). Berlin House of Representatives, printed matter 17/3105 of July 13, 2016, p. 1 and Annex 2, p. 4; accessed on March 26, 2019.
  10. ↑ “The wall reliefs in the waiting room of the polyclinic of the University Eye Clinic Halle (GDR) are identified as duplicates of the majolica reliefs of the Albrecht von Graefe monument in Berlin. It is assumed that the duplicates were given their place in the University Eye Clinic Halle under the ordinariate of Professor Alfred Graefe (1830–1899). ”(Klin. Monatsbl. Augenheilkd. 1980; 176 (5): 867-869 doi: 10.1055 / s-2008-1057574 )
  11. ↑ Text from Friedrich von Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell" (source: partial object still image Albrecht von Graefe accessed: April 25, 2018)
  12. ↑ Regulations for the granting of the Prof. Dr. v. Welz donated the “von Graefeschen Prize”. In: Report on the forty-sixth meeting of the German Ophthalmological Society in Heidelberg in 1927. Edited by A. Wagenmann, Verlag von JF Bergmann, Munich 1927, p. 507 f.
  13. ^ DOG: Statutes of: von Graefe Preis. (PDF) Retrieved December 29, 2017 .
  14. ^ Hansaviertel Berlin - Art. In: hansaviertel.berlin. Citizens' Association Hansaviertel e. V., accessed on October 3, 2019 .
  15. ^ School Albrecht von Graefe website
personal data
SURNAME Graefe, Albrecht von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Graefe, Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Albrecht von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ophthalmologist, founder of ophthalmology in Germany
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1828
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1870
Place of death Berlin