Alfred Hauptmann

Alfred Hauptmann (born August 29, 1881 in Gleiwitz , Upper Silesia , † April 5, 1948 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was a German-Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist .

Hauptmann's professional career was primarily determined by his time with the well-known neurologist Max Nonne in Hamburg. During his life, Hauptmann's research focus was mainly on the neurological field. After working in Heidelberg and Hamburg, Hauptmann went to the Freiburg University Hospital . There he completed his habilitation in 1912. His most famous work, "Luminal in Epilepsy", was published in that year. After taking part in the First World War, Hauptmann resumed his work at the University of Freiburg, where he received an extraordinary professorship in 1918 and was senior physician at the mental hospital there, before taking over the chair in Halle in 1926 .

Hauptmann was appointed professor of psychiatry at the University of Halle in 1926 . In 1929 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . Until 1935 he worked as director of the psychiatric and mental hospital in Halle, had to give up his chair in the course of the Reich Citizenship Law and finish his work as a doctor. The path to emigration , ultimately triggered by the temporary imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp , led via Switzerland and England to the USA. After his emigration, Hauptmann only managed to make a fresh start on a scientific level to a limited extent. He got a job at the Joseph H. Pratt Diagnostic Hospital in Boston. Efforts to find a position comparable to that in Germany with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation failed. He lived and worked in Boston until his death. Hauptmann never overcame the loss of his home. He died on April 5, 1948 of a “broken heart”, as his wife Selma put it in her obituary.

His most important contribution remained the article written in 1912 on the effectiveness of the phenobarbital Luminal as an anti-epileptic . On this occasion, the Alfred Hauptmann Prize for Epilepsy Research has been awarded since 1979 (jointly by the German and Austrian Societies for Epileptology and the Swiss Epilepsy League since 2009). After his emigration, together with the internist Siegfried Thannhauser, who had also emigrated, he described an autosomal dominant inherited myopathy for the first time in 1941 , which is now known as Hauptmann-Thannhauser muscular dystrophy .

Fonts (selection)

• Luminal in epilepsy . Münchner Medizinische Wochenschrift 1912; 59: 1907-1909
• Intracranial pressure. Habilitation thesis at the University of Freiburg. Union German publishing company (Stuttgart) 1914
• (with Siegfried Joseph Thannhauser): Muscular shortening and dystrophy. A heredofamilial disease . In: Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 1941; 654: Vol 46th - 664

Literature (selection)

• Peter Emil Becker : Dominant autosomal muscular dystrophy with early contractures and cardio-myopathy (Hauptmann-Thannhauser) . Hum Genet 1986; 74: 184
• M. Krasnianski; U. Honor; S. Neudecker; S. Zierz: Alfred Hauptmann, Siegfried Thannhauser, and an endangered muscular disorder . Archives of Neurology 2004; Vol. 61 (7): 1139-1141
• E. Kumbier; K. Haack: Alfred Hauptmann - fate of a German-Jewish neurologist . Progress of Neurology, Psychiatrie Volume 70, 2002, pp. 204-209
• E. Kumbier, K. Haack: How a sleeping pill became an anti-epileptic - The discovery of the anti-epileptic effect of phenobarbital by Alfred Hauptmann. In: Current Neurology. 31, 2004, pp. 302-306, doi : 10.1055 / s-2003-817879 .
• E. Kumbier; K. Haack: Pioneers in neurology: Alfred Hauptmann (1881-1948) . Journal of Neurology 251: 1288-1289
• E. Müller: Alfred Hauptmann . In: Der Nervenarzt 1948; 19: 433
• Franz Günther von Stockert : Alfred Hauptmann (1881–1948) . Arch Psych 1948; 180: 529-530
• Henrik Eberle: The Martin Luther University in the time of National Socialism. Mdv, Halle 2002, ISBN 3-89812-150-X , p. 328f

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfred Hauptmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Alfred Hauptmann in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis