Carl Anton Mense

Carl Anton Mense (born March 28, 1861 in Rheine ; † October 24, 1938 in Kassel ) was a German tropical medicine specialist and explorer.

Life

Training and first trips

Carl Anton Mense was born in Rheine in 1861, where he passed the Abitur at the Dionysianum high school. He then studied at the universities of Leipzig , Kiel , Berlin and Munich medicine . He passed his state examination in Munich in 1884 . In the same year he wrote his doctoral thesis with the title "On the behavior of clothing fabrics in drippable liquid water" at the hygienic institute in Munich.

Later in 1884 Mense became a ship's doctor and traveled to the Dutch East Indies as a crew member of a Dutch freighter . Inspired by this experience, he subsequently tried to combine his medical profession with research activities and trips. He was particularly interested in Africa .

In 1885 he joined the Belgian " International Africa Society ", which had set up a number of stations along the Congo . In June 1885 Mense himself traveled to the Congo , where he mainly worked in the stations Vivi and Leopoldville (today: Kinshasa). There he worked as a doctor and on the side carried out anthropological and linguistic studies on natives, and he also dealt with weather observations . He also explored the area around the stations. He was the first European to climb a summit of the Mangele Mountains, which was later called "Pic Mense" in recognition of his performance. As a doctor, Mense had to do with diseases with which German medical research had either hardly come into contact so far, such as beriberi , trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), medina worm ("Guinea worm") and yaws , or their causes and development so far were not thoroughly researched, for example malaria or leprosy .

Mense could therefore only limit itself to treating the symptoms . Despite this circumstance and despite the shortage of the available drugs , the effectiveness of which had to be tested, Mense came to good results and was proud that no white man had died of the notorious blackwater fever during his stay . Towards the end of his stay in the Congo, Mense took part in an expedition to the area of ​​the Kwango , a southern tributary of the Congo, the course of which was not yet fully known. Mense ended his stay in the Congo in 1887.

Further travel and settlement

After his return, Mense worked briefly as an assistant doctor in the Lazarus Hospital in Berlin, but in 1887 he took over Paul Langerhans' practice in Madeira . However, Mense only stayed briefly in Madeira, as one of his patients, the major industrialist Paul Riebeck from Halle , who had chronic lung and kidney disease , asked him to accompany him as his personal physician on a trip around the world that he wanted to undertake before his death. Together they first went to South Africa in 1888 . Mense used the stay and various round trips in the country to study the Bushmen people . The journey continued via New Zealand , Australia and Samoa to Singapore and the Chinese and Japanese empires . Riebeck died in Yokohama and Mense returned to Germany via North Africa . In Germany, Carl Mense began to work as an assistant doctor under Max Joseph at the Berlin Dermatology Clinic in 1890 . In the same year he then settled in Kassel as a doctor for skin and venereal diseases . Mense suffered from a progressive eye disease, which was probably the reason that he decided not to travel any further and settled in Kassel.

family

The parents, father Georg Mense and mother Theodora Mense, geb. Kümpers were merchants in Rheine and ran a department store . Carl Mense was the youngest of six children. His mother died giving birth.

The brother of Carl Menses mother, Carl Kümpers, was together with Carl Timmerman a partner in the company C. Kümpers and Timmerman (cotton spinning and weaving mill) and thus one of the founders of the cotton industry in Rheine.

On September 15, 1890, Mense married his wife Anna Brenken. The couple had eight children, one child died in three years at a pleurisy .

Publications

After settling in Kassel, Mense began to scientifically evaluate the extensive research results of his travels. After his return from Africa he had already published several reports on medical, hygienic , geographical and ethnological topics. In 1897 he founded the Archive for Ship and Tropical Hygiene, the first independent tropical medicine journal in Germany - this is considered his best-known work. Mense won the first tropical medicine authors as authors for the archive , making it an international magazine that was considered a leader in its field. Mense himself published a total of 33 articles between 1897 and 1931, mostly treatises on various diseases, but also on more general tropical medicine topics, such as conference reports and obituaries for deceased colleagues and employees. The editors gave 1916 three professors of the Tropical Medicine Institute in Hamburg , Friedrich Fülleborn , Martin Mayer and Peter Mühlens further, but remained in the aftermath closely linked to the archive and corrected for. B. Texts. Other publications Menses were (among others):

• Linguistic observations from the lower and central Congo , Fisher & Co., Kassel, 1895
• Tropical health and medicine , 2 volumes, Süsserott, Berlin, 1902
• Handbook of Tropical Diseases , Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag , Leipzig, 1905
• Handbook of Cosmetics , 1912
• Cosmetics in hot climates , article ed. by Max Joseph, 1912
• Smallpox and smallpox-like acute rashes in the tropics , Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig, 1914
• The African human trypanosomal disease (sleeping sickness) , Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig, 1916
• Little-known clinical pictures and disease names (of tropical diseases) , Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag, Leipzig, 1923

further activities

From 1900 to 1914, in addition to his work as a dermatologist in Kassel, Carl Mense was a teacher at the colonial school in Witzenhausen . The school, founded in 1898, had set itself the task of preparing farmers, planters, technicians and merchants for work in the German colonies, especially in Africa. This met Mense, who as a colonialist wanted to promote the settlement of Europeans in the tropics. Mense lectured there on tropical health and tropical hygiene. The school's director was the Koblenz pastor Albert Fabarius . From 1906 onwards, he strongly advocated the appointment of Menses as professor , which then took place in December 1909. Mense worked at the colonial school until 1914. At the beginning of the First World War , the number of students dropped so much that Mense could not continue his teaching activities.

In 1924, at the age of 63, he went on another four-month trip as a ship's doctor on board the "Sachsen" to Panama and California . Carl Mense was a member of the board of the German Tropical Medicine Society and the German Colonial Society . Carl Mense died on October 24, 1938 at the age of 77 in Kassel.

literature

• Carl Anton Mense. In: Heinrich Schnee (Ed.): German Colonial Lexicon. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1920, Volume II, p. 548 ( online ).

Web link

• The tropical medicine specialist Carl Mense (1861–1938) life and work. In: Archive of the University of Heidelberg. Retrieved December 1, 2015 .