Arnold Theiler

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Arnold Theiler (1923)

Sir Arnold Theiler (born March 26, 1867 in Frick ; † July 24, 1936 in London ; resident in Hasle ) was a Swiss- South African veterinarian .

Life

His parents were Franz (1832–1901), headmaster in Frick, and Maria, geb. Jenny, his siblings Marie (* 1873) and Alfred (1882–1967). He studied veterinary medicine at the Universities of Bern and Zurich and passed his state examination in 1889. Theiler settled in Beromünster , but where he was not up to the competition.

Unhappy in his private practice, he learned from a diplomat that there was no veterinary in South Africa, and in 1891 he emigrated to South Africa, where he lost all of his instruments on the way. He initially worked there as a farm worker for Alois Hugo Nellmapius near Pretoria , which at that time was still the capital of the last Boer Republic of South Africa, where he gained experience and lost his hand in a forage machine . After a year he worked as a veterinarian. In 1891 the Colonial Bacteriological Institute was founded in Grahamstown under the direction of the doctor and bacteriologist Alexander Edington (1860-1928). When in August 1892 in Swaziland , the smallpox broke out, it was feared that this also Transvaal could reach. Theiler procured the vaccine from abroad and was thus prepared when the smallpox broke out in Johannesburg in 1893 . The epidemic gave him the opportunity to prove his scientific knowledge and organizational skills for the production of smallpox lymph . In this way he won the trust of President Paul Kruger and in 1896 became the state veterinarian of the Transvaal. In 1898 he was naturalized in the Transvaal. In 1893 he married his former schoolmate Emma Sophie Jegge (1868–1951), who had financed the passage to Africa for him. In 1901 Theiler received his doctorate from the University of Bern.

After the defeat of the Boers in the Second Boer War , Theiler's real career began. In 1908 Theiler became the first head of the newly founded Veterinary Research Institute in Onderstepoort and thus of the entire veterinary system in South Africa. Robert Koch , who was called in in 1902 when coastal fever broke out , was able to identify a new parasite, Koch's blue bodies , as the cause . Arnold Theiler fully explained the life cycle of the parasite discovered by Koch. As a carrier, he identified the brown ear tick ( Rhipicephalus appendiculatus ), the distribution of which is restricted to East and South Africa. Koch had wrongly stated that the blue ear tick was the carrier of the disease. Theiler was also concerned with botulism in South Africa when this disease appeared in cattle in 1927.

Honors

For his services he was beaten on January 1, 1914 by the British King George V to Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George . In 1929 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1930 as a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences . His son Max Theiler developed a vaccine against yellow fever and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1951 .

The parasite Theileria parva , which causes coastal fever, is named after Arnold Theiler, as is the South African genus Theilera of the bluebell family .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Science and Empire: East Coast Fever in Rhodesia and the Transvaal By Paul F. Cranefield; P. 300
  2. ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
  3. ^ List of former members since 1666: Letter T. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 7, 2020 (French).
  4. ^ EP Phillips: Description of three new South African plants . In: Bothalia . tape 2 , no. 1 . South African National Biodiversity Institute, Cape Town 1927, p. 369 .
personal data
SURNAME Theiler, Arnold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss-South African veterinarian
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Frick
DATE OF DEATH July 24, 1936
Place of death London