Ernst Giese (doctor)

Ernst Herrmann Friedrich Giese (born November 27, 1865 in Jena , † December 6, 1956 ) was a German forensic doctor who held the first extraordinary teaching position for forensic medicine at the University of Jena . With Ernst Giese's appointment as full professor in 1925, forensic medicine was established as a specialty at the University of Jena. Even during the National Socialist era , Giese remained true to himself and his humanistic ideals, and in the early 1940s he defied measures by continuing to treat Jewish patients.

Life

Giese's mother Pauline came from a family of teachers, his father Wilhelm was a master carpenter and Ernst Giese was the couple's second child. Ernst Giese received his school leaving certificate in 1884 at the Carolo-Alexandrinum grammar school in Jena; then he studied medicine in Jena and Munich. In December 1888 he passed the state examination and received his doctorate barely six months later at the age of 22 with a thesis on congenital pulmonary stenosis . After his time as an assistant doctor in Halle (psychiatric and nervous clinic) and in Hamburg (internal medicine), Giese settled as a general practitioner in Jena in 1892. At the same time he worked in the Ear Clinic of the University of Jena and passed the physics examination in Weimar in 1897. In 1901 Giese was appointed district doctor and he completed his habilitation in forensic medicine with an experimental study on frostbite . In addition, forensic medicine became a compulsory subject with the new examination regulations for doctors of May 18, 1901. Giese received his venia docendi on October 23, 1901 after a trial lecture on the current state of forensic blood detection. In 1907, at the age of 42, Giese was appointed associate professor, a title which, however, did not include a teaching assignment until 1910 and after several applications, which was unpaid. It was not until 1920 that the government approved a paid teaching position, again only after several applications, including from the faculty, and in 1925, at the age of 60, Giese was appointed full professor. Giese held the post of director of the institute for forensic medicine until the beginning of his retirement in 1935. He died in 1956 at the age of 91 of a stroke.

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During his tenure at the University of Jena, Giese campaigned for the development and expansion of his subject as well as for the recognition of forensic medicine as an independent discipline. Today he is considered a pioneer in the institutionalization of forensic medicine at the University of Jena. With his habilitation in 1901 the subject of forensic medicine was represented full-time at the University of Jena, but it was not until 1919 that the Institute for Forensic Medicine was founded at Fürstengraben. Nevertheless, the subject had hardly been equipped with material until the beginning of Giese's retirement in 1935.

In addition to his work in academic teaching, Giese succeeded in the 1920s in laying the foundations for regular forensic medical care in the Thuringian region. Giese was the second autopsy at all judicial autopsies and he carried out administrative sections . After blood group determinations were introduced in cases of controversial paternity and in criminal cases , Gieses area of ​​responsibility expanded again because he was responsible for this area at all Thuringian courts.

Giese felt obliged to humanistic ideas and acted on the conviction that there was no law that forbade the treatment of Jewish patients. On the night of the pogrom in November 1938 , he saved a freshly operated patient from being deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp by declaring him unfit for transport. Giese was "then threatened anonymously by telephone and called a 'Jewish doctor'". According to files in the Jena University Archives, this was reported by the pathologist Werner Gerlach , who was the dean of the medical faculty and a member of the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler , the Thuringian doctor leader Rhode, in response to these events. Giese withstood the repression, and it made him stand out that he did not boast about his experiences even after 1945.

See also

• Medicine under National Socialism

literature

• Susanne Zimmermann: The Medical Faculty of the University of Jena during the time of National Socialism. Edited by Olaf Breidbach, VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-86135-481-0 (= Ernst-Haeckel-Haus-Studien. Volume 2, also habilitation thesis at the University of Jena 1993).

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c d e} K. Michaelis and Susanne Zimmermann: The forensic doctor Ernst Giese. In: Ehrenfried Stelzer (Ed.): Criminology and Forensic Sciences. International publication series of the Society for Forensic Medicine of the GDR. 79/80 (1990), pp. 24-26.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Christian Bode: On the history of forensic medicine at the University of Jena from 1901 to 1945. (pdf), Dissertation at the University of Jena, 2007.