Franz Volhard

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Franz Volhard (born May 2, 1872 in Munich ; † May 24, 1950 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German internist and is considered the nestor of nephrology .

family

Franz Volhard was one of seven children of chemistry professor Jacob Volhard (1834–1910; assistant to Justus von Liebig ) and Josephine nee Ofen (1842–1935). Volhard married Else Toennies in 1899. The marriage had ten children between 1900 and 1917 (29 grandchildren, including the Nobel Prize winner Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Rüdiger Volhard ).

In 1939 Volhard's second son, who was married to a Jew, emigrated to Sweden . Four sons fought in the Wehrmacht in World War II , the oldest of them, the ethnologist Ewald Volhard , died shortly before the end of the war. It was only by chance that one daughter escaped conviction by the People's Court .

Volhard was bombed twice in air raids on Frankfurt . 20 family members (including 13 grandchildren) had taken to safety in his house in Masserberg ( Thuringia ) before the bombing . Volhard personally took these relatives to the US occupation zone in May 1945 in a bus organized by the Americans - before the Red Army entered Thuringia .

Volhard died in 1950 as a result of a car accident, his grave is in the main cemetery in Frankfurt .

education and profession

Volhard attended elementary school in Erlangen , after a change of location in 1882 the Francke Foundations grammar school in Halle an der Saale , then the humanistic grammar school Schulpforta ( school leaving examination 1892). He then studied medicine in Bonn for two years . After completing his military service in Halle as a one-year volunteer, he continued his medical studies in Strasbourg (with Friedrich von Recklinghausen , Naunyn and Schmiedeberg, among others ) and then prepared his animal experimental dissertation on eclampsia with Joseph von Mering in Halle . 1897 closed Volhard medical education at the University of Halle with honors and was awarded 25 years doctorate .

This was followed by a stay in Kiel , where he met Heinrich Irenaeus Quincke , Friedrich von Esmarch and August Bier , and spent a quarter of a year in Berlin at the Pathological Institute of the Friedrichshain Hospital to train himself further in pathological anatomy . In 1898 he worked as an assistant at the Medical University Clinic in Gießen , where he worked until 1905. In 1901 he completed his habilitation (at the age of 29) at the University of Gießen in the subject of internal medicine with a thesis on fat-splitting gastric fermentation .

For a short time he headed the medical clinic in Halle, was chief physician in the internal department of the Dortmund City Hospital from 1905 to 1908 and took over the management of the City Hospital in Mannheim in 1908 (until 1918) , which he built up into an exemplary hospital. From 1909, matron Mathilde von Horn was responsible for the nursing management of the clinic . In 1908 Volhard was invited to London , where he met William Osler and the physiologist Ernest Starling .

At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Volhard was briefly drafted to Kiel as a marine doctor , but was soon able to return to his clinic in Mannheim. There he also looked after the reserve hospitals internistically and set up a special "kidney hospital". He presented his proposal for a "hunger and thirst therapy" for "war nephritis" (acute diffuse glomerulonephritis ) at an extraordinary meeting of the German Society for Internal Medicine in German-occupied Warsaw in 1916 . Volhard joined the German Fatherland Party as a conservative patriot in 1917 .

In 1918 he followed a call as a full professor of internal medicine and director of the medical clinic at the University of Halle. From 1927 he was director of the medical clinic at the University of Frankfurt am Main .

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he became a member of various NS organizations, such as the SA reserve , the National Socialist People's Welfare and an additional supporting member of the SS . A membership in the NSDAP was rejected because he had belonged to a Masonic lodge .

In 1933, as dean, he campaigned several times for Jewish faculty members, but he was unable to prevent their dismissal. His options were then restricted, despite membership in several sub-organizations of the NSDAP. During a trip to South America, he received news of his (compulsory) retirement on October 1, 1938, which - despite his age of 66 - he felt was unfair in view of his achievements and vitality. His successor was Wilhelm Nonnenbruch from 1939 to 1945 , until Franz Volhard was able to continue his work at the Frankfurt University Clinic.

During the Second World War he worked in his Frankfurt medical practice . From 1940 to 1945 he worked as a consultant internist for the Wehrmacht in the rank of naval chief medical officer in the hospitals of Frankfurt and the surrounding area and in a sanatorium ( West Sanatorium ) in Bad Nauheim . In 1945 the US military government reinstated Volhard as director of the Medical Clinic at Frankfurt University. In 1946/47 he was a witness for Wilhelm Beiglböck at the Nuremberg medical trial .

Volhard remained director of the Frankfurt University Hospital until his accidental death in 1950 at the age of 78.

power

In his habilitation thesis in 1901, Volhard reported on the discovery of the fat-splitting ferment in the stomach ( gastric lipase ). He dealt with venous pulse recording (1902), the quantitative determination of pepsin and the alkaline binding capacity of gastric juice (1903), with liver pulses and cardiac arrhythmias (1904), alternating pulse phenomena and, for the first time, with kidney diseases and hypertension (1905). Volhard's collection of paraffin hearts was famous.

Volhard developed a quantitative trypsin determination method , worked on carbonic acid poisoning , tuberculin treatment and the differential diagnosis of heart defects and heart block . In 1909 he presented a mercury manometer for the oscillatory or auscultatory measurement of diastolic blood pressure and researched kidney diseases with Theodor Fahr (water experiment, concentration experiment ). In 1910 he classified shrink kidneys according to functional criteria. Above all, kidney pathology was now in the foreground: after ten years of preparatory work, the first large, comprehensive work on kidney diseases was published in 1917, in which renal dysfunction was dealt with in detail and the pathogenetic classification into nephritis (inflammatory), nephrosis (degenerative) and nephrosclerosis (arteriosclerotic) was presented.

In Halle he conducted the main clinical lecture and dealt with the pathophysiology of pulmonary emphysema and ophthalmological-renal issues. At the Congress for Internal Medicine in Vienna in 1923 he gave a first lecture on the symptomatology and the pathomechanisms of "pale" and "red" hypertension. In the same year he reported on the surgical therapy of the armored heart ( pericardial resection , together with Viktor Schmieden) and coined the term cardiac congestion . Among other things, he introduced the salt-free diet for heart disease and hypertension. In 1931 appeared as volume six (part 1 + 2) of the second edition of the “ Handbook for Internal Medicine ” Volhard's almost 2000-page handbook of kidney diseases (the “Kidney Bible”) and in 1942 a collection of lectures on kidney diseases and hypertension. Volhard's specialty also included iridology , which is now rejected as a pseudoscience .

In the 1920s and 1930s, Volhard was very cautious about the possibilities of renal replacement therapy with dialysis . From 1924 to 1928 Georg Haas performed hemodialysis treatments on humans for the first time in Gießen .

In 1933, Volhard and Harvey Cushing received an honorary doctorate from the Paris University ( Sorbonne ), the first German after the First World War. A year later he treated King Fuad in Egypt , gave scientific lectures all over Europe, for example in Athens and Malmö , also in the USA and was invited to Córdoba ( Argentina ) in 1938 .

Volhard was a member and master in various Masonic lodges .

After the Second World War, he campaigned for Germany's re-entry into the international scientific community in numerous lecture tours.

In 1947, Volhard also recognized the possibilities of hemodialysis for acute kidney failure. He asked Nils Alwall in Lund for a dialysis machine. This was promised to him and was about to be delivered when Volhard died acutely in 1950.

Volhard published 156 scientific articles and was a member of more than 12 scientific societies. Under him, 18 students completed their habilitation, from which important scientists developed. He was the founder of a large and extensive internist-nephrological school in Germany.

Honors

Designations

Quotes from Volhard

  • "So that you don't write nonsense about me" (to his students in 1942, when he gave them a laudation that he himself had prepared for his 70th birthday)
  • “Gentlemen have a 24-hour working day. I don't care what you do in the meantime. "
  • "How do you come to contradict me?" (At night to a consulted employee)
  • "Today's truth is tomorrow's error." ( With express reference to his own work ; quoted by his son Ernst Volhard)

useful information

  • Franz Volhard, his clinic and his treatment are described in the Frankfurt travelogue of the Turkish writer Ahmet Haşim , who was his patient in autumn 1932.
  • The stately house in Masserberg in the Thuringian Forest, which Volhard had acquired in 1922 and which was a refuge for his daughters and daughters-in-law and 13 grandchildren from the air raids in World War II, deteriorated during the GDR era and was demolished.

Works

A detailed bibliography (from 1897 to 1950) can be found in the book Franz Volhard - Memories on the occasion of his 110th birthday; However, his controversial salt-free health diet is missing here .

  • Experimental and critical studies on the pathogenesis of eclampsia . Medical dissertation Halle 1897
  • About the fat-splitting ferment of the stomach (medical habilitation thesis). Journal of Clinical Medicine 43 (1901) 302
  • About measuring diastolic blood pressure in humans . German Society for Internal Medicine (Verh.) 20 (1909) 200
  • About the functional differentiation of the shrink kidneys . Dtsch Kongr Inn Med (Verh) 27 (1910) 735
  • Bright's kidney disease. Clinic, Pathology and Atlas . Berlin 1914
  • The arterial high pressure . German Society for Internal Medicine (Verh) 35 (1923) 134
  • The salt-free health food . 1st edition 1930, 10th edition 1942, 13th edition (published by his son Ernst Volhard), Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag , Munich 1952
  • The double-sided hematogenic kidney diseases (Bright's disease) , Springer-Verlag, 1st edition, Berlin / Heidelberg 1918, 576 pages plus appendix, reprint from III. Volume of the "Handbook of Internal Medicine" (edited by L. Mohr and Rudolf Staehelin ), ISBN 978-3-662-42272-4 ( reprint )
  • The bilateral hematogenous kidney disease . In: Gustav von Bergmann , Rudolf Staehelin (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Innere Medizin , 2nd edition, published by Julius Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 1931, Volume 6, two parts, ISBN 978-3-662-42701-9 (reprint of part 2, pages 1025-2140), 2140 pages
  • Kidney disease and hypertension . Leipzig 1942
  • The pathogenesis of hypertension . German Society for Circulatory Research (Verh) 15 (1949) 40, 107
  • Before the therapy, the gods put the diagnosis , Deutsche Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Grenzach 1952, 23 pages

literature

Web links

Commons : Franz Volhard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Grave of Franz Volhard in the Frankfurt main cemetery (grave V 311, location , pictures )
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 644.
  3. ^ Helmut Siefert: Franz Volhard , in: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the 20th century , 1st edition 1995 CH Beck Munich p. 367, Medical dictionary. From antiquity to the present , 2nd edition 2001, p. 320 + 321, 3rd edition 2006 Springer Verlag Heidelberg, Berlin, New York p. 333. doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .
  4. ^ Johanna Bleker : The history of kidney diseases , Boehringer Mannheim 1972, pp. 121-125.
  5. ^ Member entry of Franz Volhard at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on March 11, 2017.
  6. ^ Franz Volhard: The sickness food free of salt , 13th edition, Johann Ambrosius Barth Verlag , Munich 1952, foreword p. III.
  7. ^ Frankfurt Seyahatnamesi . 1933. - German: Frankfurter Reisebericht. Frankfurt 2008. Literaturca Verlag. ISBN 3-935535-18-X
  8. ^ Hans Erhard Bock , Karl Heinz Hildebrand, Hans Joachim Sarre (Eds.): Franz Volhard - Recollections , Schattauer Verlag , Stuttgart, New York 1982, ISBN 3-7845-0898-X , pp. 341-345.
personal data
SURNAME Volhard, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German nephrologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 1950
Place of death Frankfurt am Main