Alfred Loeser

Alfred Alexander Loeser (born October 12, 1887 in Nimptsch , † 1962 in London ) was a German-British doctor.

Life and activity

Alfred Loeser was the son of a health officer. After attending school, he studied at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin medicine . In 1913 he received his doctorate. med.

After working as a house surgeon in Frankfurt and as a ship's doctor, his interest in bacteriology prompted him to go to Berlin, where he spent four years as Julius Morgenroth's assistant at the Charité Institute of Pathology .

In the first two years of World War I he was employed as a field-service medical officer on the Eastern Front. After being wounded in 1916, he spent four years as an assistant at the gynecological clinic of the University of Rostock , where he acquired the basics of his knowledge in the fields of obstetrics and gynecology.

In 1920 Loeser returned to the Berlin Charité, where he was given a position as assistant to the gynecological clinic under Karl Franz . At that time he devoted himself to researching the cell metabolism of the placenta . Following advice from Otto Warburg , he used the knowledge he had gained in this way to conduct in-vitro studies on the fermentation and ventilation of cancer cells, paying particular attention to the influence of hormones on these processes judged.

He later became head of the gynecological department of the Jewish Hufeland Hospital in Berlin.

1934 emigrated Loeser, who was facing increasing since 1933 because of his Jewish by Nazi definition descent in Germany repression and harassment, to Britain, where he held a private practice in London opened. Shortly before, the Deutsches Ärzteblatt published a photo of the tall and slim man and called him a "typically German doctor" - apparently in ignorance of his Jewish ancestry.

Loeser's research on hormonal effects on carcinomas ultimately led to the discovery that testosterone had an inhibitory effect on the growth of breast cancer . This treatment method, which he described for the first time at a gynecological congress in Amsterdam in 1938, soon developed into a standard procedure in the medical care of this disease. The treatment of female genital cancer with hormones goes back to Loeser and, according to Davis, is his most important contribution to research. His research is reflected in numerous publications in specialist journals.

family

Loeser was married to Susanne Courant (1897–1961) and had two daughters. His wife died, as his obituary noted, of breast cancer of all things, the disease that he had spent his entire life researching to cure it.

Fonts

• On the final results of appendectomies performed because of chronic appendicitis and intermittent appendectomies , 1913.
• About pyocaneus infection and pyocyaneus agglutinins. In: Central sheet for internal medicine , Vol. 37, 1916,.
• Incomplete uterine rupture. In: Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie , 1917, pp. 985-989.
• The importance of latent microbism and latent infection. In: Contributions to the Clinic of Infectious Diseases and Immunity Research, 1917, pp. 248-254.
• The latent infection of the birth tract. In: Archiv für Gynäkologie , Vol. 108, 1918, Issue 1, pp. 137–156.
• Method for the preparation of fresh antigonorrhea vaccines , 1926.
• The healing of chronic uterine and adnex gonorrhea by subcutaneous injection of living gonococci (live vaccine) , 1928, No. 25, pp. 965-967.
• Breathing and fermentation of the surviving placenta in humans as well as their influence by hormones along with the lactic acid metabolism of the living placenta in pregnant animals. In: Archiv für Gynäkologie , Vol. 148, 1932, pp. 118–148.

literature

• John Cooper: Pride Versus Prejudice: Jewish Doctors and Lawyers in England, 1890-1990 , 2003, p. 221.
• Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 242.
• Albert Davis: Obituary. In: The Journal of the International College of Surgeons , Vol. 40, 1962, pp. 46f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dagmar Hartung-von Doetinchem / Rolf Winau: Destroyed Progress: the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, 1756, 1861, 1914, 1989 , 1989, p. 272.