Anton von Braunmühl (psychiatrist)

Anton Adalbert Edler von Braunmühl (born October 14, 1901 in Kelheim , † March 12, 1957 in Munich ) was a German psychiatrist . He became known as a pioneer in the somatic therapy of mental illnesses . Braunmühl used shock therapies on a large scale , including electroconvulsive therapy as one of the first German psychiatrists . Later he was one of the supporters of the leukotomy .

Live and act

As the son of the magistrate Anton Padua von Braunmühl and his wife Anna geb. Stangl, born in Kelheim, studied medicine in Munich and completed his practical year as Walther Spielmeyer's assistant at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry . Immediately after his doctorate and license to practice medicine , Braunmühl came to the Eglfing-Haar sanatorium and nursing home as an assistant doctor in May 1927 , where he was to remain active until his death except for a short break in 1946.

After he was refused a habilitation in 1934 because he was not a member of the NSDAP , Braunmühl completed his habilitation in 1943. His specialty was histopathology . He introduced the colloid-chemical approach to neuropathology and carried out model experiments on the formation of plaques and fibril changes in the brain , which he interpreted as an expression of syneresis and thus as facultative features of physical-chemical processes.

As a prison doctor, Braunmühl mainly devoted himself to the causal therapy of mental illnesses. From 1936 onwards he introduced newly developed somatic treatment methods in the Eglfing-Haar institution. On November 3, 1936, an insulin station was opened under his direction, where insulin shock therapy was carried out. Braunmühl combined this therapy with cardiazole shock therapy and in 1938 tried the anti-spasmodic Azoman from Boehringer & Sohn . His treatment center raised hopes among visitors that schizophrenia could be treated effectively.

After a visit to the Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti , who was the first to use electroconvulsions on people in 1938, Braunmühl purchased an electroconvulsive device from Siemens - Reiniger and began this form of therapy in December 1939. By the end of 1941 he administered around 6,000 convulsive treatments in Eglfing-Haar. In contrast to Friedrich Meggendorfer in Erlangen , who fixed the electrodes rigidly to the patient's head, Braunmühl developed mobile, hand-guided electrodes. Braunmühl also let the patients take what he called “ embryonic storage”. He combined the insulin shock therapy and ECT treatment, as during the Second World War , the insulin was scarce.

In publications, Braunmühl advocated an active therapeutic approach by psychiatrists and turned against critics who compared the somatic treatment methods with notorious early treatment methods in psychiatry such as the swivel chair or the injection molding machine. He was aware of the dangers of the new therapies for patients - a patient had died from the therapy shortly after the insulin station opened - but felt that the severity of the disease justified him in using them. This radical emphasis on therapy was described as part of the concept of Nazi psychiatry, which saw itself essentially as a medical healing science and abandoned those who appeared to be no longer curable to annihilation.

Braunmühl advocated the compulsory sterilization of the therapist because he too saw the cause of the mental illness to be rooted in the genetic make-up . However, he did not take an active part in the extermination campaigns against mentally ill people such as Action T4 . According to his own account, he was the only prison doctor to confront the prison's director, Hermann Pfannmüller , because the mass transfers seemed suspicious to him and refused to be on call on days when the non-profit sick transport company was picking up patients. Pfannmüller, for whom Braunmühl served as the institution's figurehead because of his therapies, promised not to bother him any more.

Hans-Ludwig Siemen concedes that one possible motive for Braunmühl may have been to save as many people as possible through healing through his therapies. At the same time he points out that under Braunmühl and Pfannmüller in Eglfing-Haar the inhuman psychiatry program of National Socialism was implemented in a particularly extreme way. While Braunmühl treated more than 500 patients with the most modern methods, more than 1,800 people were deported to the Grafeneck and Hartheim killing centers and murdered there. The historian Sibylle von Tiedemann believes it has been proven that Braunmühl probably never worked in one of the “hunger houses” in Eglfing-Haar, where patients were murdered through systematic food withdrawal. But as the treating doctor, he accompanied 60 patients up to their unnatural death. He was a “confidante and accomplice” who stopped coming to terms with the war after the war.

After the end of the war in May 1945, Braunmühl initially took over the management of the clinic in Eglfing-Haar on a provisional basis. On December 1, 1945, the American military administration appointed him director of the Kaufbeuren sanatorium . In August 1946, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior reinstated him as director of Eglfing-Haar in place of Gerhard Schmidt , who was pushed out of office by the workforce. Braunmühl apparently promoted personnel from the Nazi era. The director of the Erlangen sanatorium and nursing home , Werner Leibbrand, criticized the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior in 1947 for the fact that Braunmühl, who was "known for his reactionary sentiments", reinstated "burdened old medical councilors" and shouted "completely unencumbered younger people".

In 1947 Braunmühl received an honorary professorship in Munich. He was one of the first German psychiatrists to introduce the leukotomy methods developed in the USA at his institution after the end of the Second World War . He also translated the book Psychosurgery by the two American lobotomy pioneers Walter Freeman and James Watts into German. Furthermore, after 1945 he speculated about possible illnesses of Adolf Hitler . In an essay from 1954 he said that he could determine Paralysis Agitans ( Parkinson's disease ) in Hitler. He also made a name for himself as an amateur painter .

In 1976, at the request of the clinic, von-Braunmühl-Strasse was named after him in Haar . Recent research for a memorial book for the Munich victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia” murders made it clear that Braunmühl was more deeply involved in the crimes than previously known. Therefore, on March 1, 2019, the community of Haar renamed von-Braunmühlstrasse to Max-Isserlin-Strasse .

Fonts

• About some myelo-lymphoid and lymphoepithelial organs of the anuras. A contribution z. Morphol. of the jugular corpuscle of the corpus propericardiale and corpus procoracoidale like the gill cavity corpuscles of Rana temporaris. Munich, Med. Diss., 1927 (only in limited numbers for exchange). Akad. Verlagsges, Leipzig 1926.
• with Walter Spielmeyer: The anatomy of psychoses. Springer, Berlin 1930.
• Oswald Bumke, Anton von Braunmühl and Walter Spielmeyer: Handbook of mental illnesses. Springer, Berlin 1930, ISBN 978-3-540-07661-2 .
• The electroconvulsive in psychiatry. In: Münch. med. Wschr 87 (1940), pp. 511-514.
• Insulin shock treatment of schizophrenia (taking into account cardiazole spasm). A guide to practice. A. v. Braunmühl. J. Springer, Berlin 1938.
• Five years of shock and cramp treatment in Eglfing hair. In: Arch. F. Psych. 114,2 (1941), pp. 410-440.
• ... That delights my youth. Diary pages of an Inntaler. Echter, Würzburg 1941.
• Insulin shock and healing spasm in psychiatry. 2nd Edition. Wissenschaftliche Verl. Ges, Stuttgart 1947.
• Walter Freeman, James W. Watts: Psychosurgery. Intelligence, emotional life and social behavior after pre-frontal lobotomy in mental disorders. Translated by Anton von Braunmühl, Wissenschaftl. Verl.-Ges, Stuttgart 1949.
• (Ed.): Controversial Problems of Medicine. With contributions from Anton v. Braunmühl [u. a.]. Medica-Verl, Stuttgart, Zurich 1954.
• The hair nerve hospital near Munich in the district of Upper Bavaria. 1905-1955. District of Upper Bavaria, Munich 1956.

literature

• Julius Hallervorden : In Memoriam Anton von Braunmühl † (1901–1957) . In: Der Nervenarzt 28 (1957), p. 375f.
• Bernhard Richarz: Healing, caring for, killing. On the everyday history of a sanatorium and nursing home up to the end of National Socialism . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1987.
• In memoriam Anton Edler von Braunmühl . In: Biomedical Engineering / Biomedical Engineering. Volume 3, Issue 6, p. 179.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Richarz, Heilen , pp. 86-98.
2. ↑ Braunmühl, A. (1942): About mobile electrode technology in electroconvulsive therapy. In: Archiv f. Psychiatrie 114 (3), pp. 605-610
3. ↑ Richarz, Heilen , pp. 98-107.
4. ↑ Richarz, Heilen , p. 86.
5. ↑ Hans-Ludwig Siemen: Psychiatry in National Socialism . In: Michael von Cranach u. Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Ed.): Psychiatry in National Socialism. The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes between 1933 and 1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 28f.
6. ↑ Richarz, Heilen , p. 106.
7. ↑ Richarz, Heilen , p. 160.
8. ↑ Hans-Ludwig Siemen: The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes during National Socialism . In: Michael von Cranach u. Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Ed.): Psychiatry in National Socialism. The Bavarian sanatoriums and nursing homes between 1933 and 1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 457f.
9. ↑ ^{a b} Bernhard Lohr: Painful search for the truth . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 18, 2017.
10. ↑ Braunmühl, Anton von: "Was Hitler ill?" In: Voices of the Time 79 (1954, pp. 94-102.)
11. ↑ https://www.gemeinde-haar.de/aktuelles/18_12_2018_strassenumbennung Max Isserlin instead of Braunmühl