Carl Coutelle

Carl Coutelle (born July 1, 1908 in Elberfeld , †  June 24, 1993 in Berlin ) was a German doctor and pathologist . During the Spanish Civil War he worked as a doctor for the International Brigades . After the Second World War, he initially held leading positions in the central administration for the health system in the Soviet zone of occupation and later from 1959 to 1963 as a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin and then until 1971 as a full professor and institute director at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg .

Life

Carl Coutelle was born in 1908 to a German father and a mother from Lausanne . Both parents came from the Huguenot religious community . His father worked in Elberfeld as a doctor of chemistry at IG Farben . Carl Coutelle completed after the Elberfeld gymnasium studies in medicine at the universities of Bonn , Dusseldorf and Freiburg and laid 1932, the medical state examination and the oral doctoral exam from. In January 1933 he began his medical internship at the General Hospital Barmbeck in Hamburg . Due to the law to restore the civil service , however, he was dismissed without notice in July of the same year because he had joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) three years earlier . He was also of the University of Freiburg relegated , making the medical approval and the completion of his his promotion were denied. He only received his doctorate retrospectively in 1946. In 1933 Carl Coutelle went to the Soviet Union , where he got a position as an assistant at the State Research Institute for Physiology in Moscow . He particularly acquired histological working techniques and studied the nervous system . The investigation of the morphology and physiology of nerves and ganglia formed the focus of his research interests in later work.

With the beginning of the Spanish Civil War he joined the International Brigades , for which he worked from 1937 until the end of the war in April 1939 as a doctor in various hospitals on the front and in the hinterland. During this time he met his future wife Rosa Süßmann, who also worked as a doctor for the interbrigades and came from the Ukraine as a Jew . Both married during the war. After the end of the war they were interned in various camps in southern France . After his release, Carl Coutelle decided to join the China Medical Aid Committee , which had been established in the United States , England and other countries, together with other doctors on behalf of the International Red Cross to go to the Republic of China via London to initially open the Chinese Red Cross To support the army of Chiang Kai-shek in southern China and from 1943 the medical service of the Chinese troops stationed in British India during the Second Sino- Japanese War . His wife went into exile in London, where she worked during the war at various hospitals in Sheffield , Chesterfield , Birmingham and as director of the children's department at the City General Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent . In September 1939 their only son Charles Coutelle was born, who became a human geneticist after studying medicine in the GDR .

In November 1945 Carl Coutelle returned to Berlin , where he reunited with his family the following year. In 1946 he became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). He took up a position in the central administration for the health system in the Soviet zone of occupation , where he initially worked as a head of department in the personnel department, from September 1946 as head of the main statistics, legislation, organization department, from September 1947 as head of the medical professions department and from 1948 as head the Personnel and Training Department was active. Within the central administration he was seen as a representative of a “radical personnel policy” in the sense of denazification . In 1949 he became an employee of the main health care administration of the German Economic Commission . In the same year, however, he turned back to a scientific activity and began as an assistant at the Pathological Institute in Berlin-Buch and later at the Institute for Pathology at the Charité . Five years later, he was with a thesis on nerve propagation in tumors habilitation . In 1955 he was appointed lecturer and in 1958 prosector at the Pathological Institute of the Charité, in 1959 he became a professor with a teaching position at the Medical Faculty of the Humboldt University. Four years later, he moved to the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg as full professor and director of the Institute for Pathology , where he worked until his retirement in 1971 and also temporarily headed the Institute for Forensic Medicine. He died in Berlin in 1993.

Awards

Carl Coutelle was awarded the Gold Patriotic Order of Merit in the GDR and, as a former member of the International Brigades, the Hans Beimler Medal .

Works (selection)

• About nerve spread in experimental mouse tumors. Berlin 1954 (habilitation thesis)
• Special pathology textbook. Jena 1976; Licensed edition, Stuttgart 1976 (as co-author)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ All biographical information, unless otherwise stated, from Ingeborg Rapoport, Veröff. Med. Ges. 13/2007, pp. 57–62 (see literature)
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Coutelle, Carl, Dr. med. (1908). In: Martin Broszat , Hermann Weber : SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany 1945–1949. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-48-655262-7 , p. 883
3. ^ Wolfram Fischer : Exodus of Sciences from Berlin. Series: Research report of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Volume 7. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-11-013945-6 , note 101 on p. 64
4. ^ Coutelle, Carl. In: Volker Klimpel: Politician-Doctors: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Lexikon. Guido Pressler Verlag , Hürtgenwald 2001, ISBN 3-87-646095-6 , p. 34.
5. ↑ Information on awards from: Coutelle, Carl, Prof. Dr. med. habil. In: Karl Seidel (ed.) And others: In service to people: memories of the development of the new health system 1945–1949. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 357

literature

• Ingeborg Rapoport : Carl Coutelle (1908–1993) in memory. In: Publ. Med. Ges. 13/2007 (Issue 62). Published by the interest group medicine and society e. V., pp. 57-62, ISSN  1430-6964

Web links

• Literature by and about Carl Coutelle in the catalog of the German National Library