Edwin Blos

Vinzens Wilhelm Edwin Blos (born April 19, 1873 in Konstanz , † December 4, 1943 in Hinterstein ) was a German doctor, pioneer of homeopathy and Buddhist .

Live and act

Edwin Blos came to Constance in 1873 as the son of train master Vinzens Blos from Reicholzheim and his wife Wilhelmine, nee. Burst to the world. He studied medicine in Heidelberg and Berlin . With Vincenz Czerny he did his doctorate on tuberculous lymphomas and their relationship to pulmonary tuberculosis . He received his license to practice medicine on July 6, 1897 in Karlsruhe . Here he worked very successfully as a general practitioner and surgeon . Blos was one of the first to introduce twilight sleep anesthesia into operative medicine. According to his daughter, his " prophetic figure " and his long beard earned him the nickname "the bloody savior" at this time. Blos already found his medical work unsatisfactory and looked for new ways, including homeopathy and the findings of Samuel Hahnemann . The First World War brought a complete change in his life, when Blos contracted severe pulmonary tuberculosis while operating in the dull casemates of Fort de Mutzig . Abandoned by his doctor colleagues, he treated himself successfully and spent several years in Davos.

In the 1920s he again ran a very successful medical practice and private clinic in Karlsruhe. Similar to Paul Dahlke and in contact with his Buddhist house in Berlin, Edwin Blos became a Buddhist and from then on stood out in public because of his clothing ("like Gandhi "). Three of his books from 1930/1931 mark the completed change to the critic of conventional medicine : The Crisis in Medicine , Die Medizin am Scheidewege and Hahnemann, the founder of colloidal chemistry . In 1932 he broke with his whole previous life and withdrew in complete poverty and lack of needs in a forest hut ( hermitage ) on the Rauhen Alb . There he lived for years in seclusion and silence and dedicated himself to meditation in the spirit of Buddhism. After a cure in Arosa in 1936, Blos lived in the village of Hinterstein near Bad Hindelang in the Allgäu until his death . Here he was looked after and looked after by the actress Elisabeth Bertram, a friend of his daughter's. When the war broke out, he was the only doctor in a larger district, so he resumed his professional activity with the support of Elisabeth Bertram. His homeopathic work, which was extremely successful with the rural population and even with the animals, and his waiver of fees, combined with his impressive appearance (with a long white beard), soon earned him the reputation of a "miracle healer". This led to supraregional awareness, countless sick letters and then in 1942 to a lawsuit with the medical district association of Allgäu and the responsible health department, which Blos won.

His last big project was to make Hahnemann's achievements more researchable on the basis of his daily practice. For this purpose, he wanted the in the basement of the Hippokrates publishing house Marquardt & Cie. Editing 55 volumes of medical journals stored in Stuttgart (16 of which are in French) and letters to Samuel Hahnemann from patients. However, his own illness and physical weakness prevented him from realizing. The medical journals and patient letters are now in the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Stiftung Stuttgart. Some of the journals have now been edited.

Edwin Blos was married to Eva Lewinstein, the sister of his best friend, the doctor and pacifist Georg Friedrich Nicolai . They had three children. The daughter Dr. Ruth Katz (born 1900) practiced as a doctor with a focus on homeopathy v. a. in Pforzheim. The older son Dr. Dietrich Blos (born 1901) worked as a doctor in Berlin and after the Second World War a. a. the first President of the DRK in Berlin. The youngest son Dr. Peter Blos (born 1904) worked first in Vienna and emigrated in 1934 to the United States, specializing from about 1938 as a psychoanalyst on the topic adolescence . His monograph on this is considered a standard work.

Edwin Blos' estate is in the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Stiftung Stuttgart.

Fonts

• About tuberculous lymphomas and their relationship to pulmonary tuberculosis. Fischer, Jena 1899 (Heidelberg, Med. Diss. 1898).
• About Schneiderlin's scopolamine morphine anesthesia. Publisher of the H. Laupp'schen Buchhandlung, Tübingen 1902.
• The crisis in medicine. Braun, Karlsruhe 1930.
• Medicine at the crossroads. Five chapters to build a synthetic medicine. Kairos, Karlsruhe 1931.
• Hahnemann, the founder of colloidal chemistry. Colloidal chemistry, a way to scientifically justify high potency. Kairos, Karlsruhe 1931.

as well as numerous articles, e.g. B .:

• Samuel Hahnemann and Goethe. In: The country doctor. Weekly for medical exchange of views. Stuttgart, Jg. 21-1940, No. 17, pp. 123-125.
• On Samuel Hahnemann's teaching on psoriasis . In: Hippocrates. Official bulletin of the scientific society for natural living and healing eV Stuttgart, 1941 issue 15, pp. 405–407.

Web links

• Literature by and about Edwin Blos in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Csaba Nikolaus Nemes: Southwest - a cradle of German anesthesia. , Überlingen am Bodensee 2008, p. 6
2. ↑ Envelope to a Dr. Fritsche from August 27, 1944 in his estate.
3. ^ Peter Conzen: Erik H. Erikson . Life and work. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1996.
4. ↑ (doctorate on the lymphatic throat ring and the constitution . Springer, Berlin 1925).
5. ^ Author: The Berlin Red Cross. Colloquium-Verlag, Berlin 1979; In a conversational tone. 55 short stories from the life of a Berlin doctor. Berlin-Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1985.
6. ↑ 1962; German: adolescence. A psychoanalytic interpretation. Klett-Cotta 1973, 8th edition 2011, ISBN 978-3-608-94333-7 .
7. ↑ Aaron H. Eisman: Obituary of Peter Blos. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 78, 1997, 813-814. And: http://www.answers.com/topic/blos-peter#ixzz2hc9MAdVl .