Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke

Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke

Ernst Wilhelm Brücke , since 1873 Ritter von Brücke (born June 6, 1819 in Berlin , Kingdom of Prussia , † January 7, 1892 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ), was a German-Austrian physiologist and medical researcher.

Life

Ernst Wilhelm Brücke was born in Berlin as the son of the history painter Johann Gottfried Brücke (1796–1873) and the Stralsund citizen's daughter Christine Müller (deceased 1822). When his mother died in 1822, the superintendent Karl Ludwig Droysen (1756–1831) - a distant relative on his mother's side - took him into his house. He went to high school in Stralsund and from 1838 studied medicine at the University of Berlin, the University of Heidelberg and again in Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1842 with Johannes Müller with a thesis on diffusion processes. During his assistantship with Müller, which he began in 1843, he achieved his habilitation in 1844 (private lecturer) and from 1846 he taught anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. During this time he made close friendships with the physician Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) and the anatomist Carl Ludwig (1816-1895). His publications appeared in Johannes Müller's archive until 1849. On January 14, 1845, he founded the Physical Society in Berlin together with Emil Du Bois-Reymond and other students of the physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus . The German Physical Society later emerged from this society .

In 1848 he succeeded Friedrich Burdach as professor of physiology in Königsberg , and from 1849 to 1890 he was professor of physiology and microscopic anatomy at the University of Vienna . Here he worked alongside the medical scientists who had shaped Vienna’s influence, such as the anatomist Joseph Hyrtl (1810–1894), the pathologist Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878), the internist Josef Skoda (1805–1881), the dermatologist Ferdinand von Hebra ( 1816–1880) and the surgeon Theodor Billroth (1829–1894). He himself was a member of the core group of the famous Viennese clinical medicine . With Hyrtl there were also violent academic disputes. During his time in Vienna, von Brücke also formed a close friendship with the writer Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863). In 1849 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The research topics he worked on were very extensive, as were the publications that resulted from them. In 1851, for example, he developed a new dissecting loupe by combining two lenses for magnification purposes and the "Brück'sche loupe" was created. One of his research topics at the time was the physiology of language. As a result, the work "Basics of the Physiology and Systematics of Speech Sounds" appeared in 1856. While studying the composition and mode of action of the protoplasm in 1861 he came to the realization that the protoplasm of plants and animals is the same, that it is the carrier of the life and essence of the cell. Then in 1866 he went public with the text “Physiology of Colors for the Purposes of Applied Arts”. His main work, however, were the "Lectures on Physiology" which appeared from 1873 to 1887 in a total of four editions.

During his creative period in Vienna, he received the highest honors, including the appointment to the court councilor and the hereditary knighthood (1873). In addition, he was rector of the University of Vienna in 1879/80, the first non-Catholic in this office. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Pour le Mérite order . In 1879 he was appointed a permanent member of the manor house of the Austrian Imperial Council. He had been a member of the Leopoldina Academic Academy since 1852, a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences since 1854, a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences since 1861 and a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since 1873 .

With Carl Ludwig , Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Brücke was one of the staunch advocates of the school of organic physics, who wanted to practice physiology exclusively on the basis of the exact natural sciences and in a decided contrast to so-called "romantic physiology" or to older ones saw vitalist currents. In this connection, Du Bois-Reymond's statement in a letter to Hallmann is famous, in which it says: “Brücke and I, we have conspired to assert the truth that no other forces are active in the organism than those that are common physical -chemical. "

Brückes physiological-anatomical work was extensive and extended in Königsberg to the investigation of the eye muscles. His anatomical description of the human eyeball (1847) was a prerequisite for Helmholtz's ophthalmoscope. In Vienna, research was carried out on digestive physiology, the effectiveness of pepsin , urine and bile pigment, and blood clotting . In comparative cell physiological studies, he proved that the protoplasm of plants and animals is equally as eatable . Following Max Schultze (1825–1874), Brücke interpreted the protoplasm as an important component of the cell, and Rudolf Virchow interpreted it as the elementary organism of life. For a long time, studies on stimulus movement carried out by Brücke on Mimosa pudica were also trend-setting . Pointing far beyond physiology, but always guided by it, were his philological-aesthetic works on phonetics, meter and color theory as well as on the fine arts.

Ernst von Brücke died on January 7, 1892 in Vienna.

Works

• Brücke, Ernst W. 1848. About the movements of the Mimosa pudica. Archives for Anatomy, Physiology and Scientific Medicine: 434–455
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1852. Contributions to the comparative anatomy and physiology of the vascular system. Memoranda: Academy of Sciences Vienna, Mathematical and Natural Science Class 3: 335–367
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1856. Basic features of the physiology and systematics of speech sounds for linguists and teachers of the deaf and dumb. Vienna: C. Gerold & Son
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1861. The elementary organisms. Session reports of the mathematical and natural science class of the Imperial Academy of Sciences 44: 381–406
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1863 New methods of phonetic transcription.
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1866. The physiology of colors for the purposes of the applied arts. Leipzig: S. Hirzel
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1871. The physiological foundations of the New High German verse. Vienna: C. Gerold & Son
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1873. Lectures on physiology. - Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf , further editions until 1887
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1877. Fragments from the theory of the fine arts.
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1891, Beauty and Defects of the Human Shape. Vienna
• Brücke, Ernst W. 1893, How do you protect the life and health of children?
• Investigations into the color change of the African chameleon (1851–52). Edited by M. von Frey. Ostwalds Klassiker 43, Leipzig 1893, archive
• Plant Physiological Treatises (1844–1862). Published by A. Fischer. Ostwald's Classic No. 95, Leipzig 1898, Archive

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Bridge, Ernst . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 2nd part. Publishing house of the typographic-literary-artistic establishment (L. C. Zamarski, C. Dittmarsch & Comp.), Vienna 1857, p. 169 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Robert Ritter von Töply:  Bridge, Ernst von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 47, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1903, pp. 273-275.
• Hermann Ziegenspeck :  Bridge, Ernst von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 655 ( digitized version ).
• Bridge Ernst Wilhelm von. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 119.
• Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm von , in: Élisabeth Roudinesco ; Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: Names, Countries, Works, Terms . Translation from French. Vienna: Springer, 2004, ISBN 3-211-83748-5 , pp. 141f.
• Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Bridge, Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 215.
• Jutta Schickore: The eye of the body and its technical externalization. Ernst Wilhelm Brückes Research on Vision, 1841-1847 . In: Technikgeschichte, Vol. 66 (1999), H. 4, pp. 337-348.

Web links

Commons : Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke in the catalog of the German National Library
• Picture, short biography and references to digital sources in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (English)
• http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/2851.html (English)
• Member entry of Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on January 7, 2020.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://alex.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/alex?aid=sph&date=0009&page=162&size=45
2. ^ Members of the previous academies. Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on March 3, 2015 . 
3. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 50.
4. ↑ Member entry by Ernst Ritter von Brücke at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on December 21, 2016.
5. ^ ^{A b} Christoph Gradmann : Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. In: Wolfgang U. Eckart , Christoph Gradmann (Hrsg.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the present. 3. Edition. Springer Verlag, Heidelberg / Berlin / New York 2006, p. 67 f. Medical glossary 2006 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .