Franz Ignaz Pruner

Franz Ignaz Pruner

Franz Ignaz Pruner (also: Prun (n) er-Bey ; * March 8, 1808 in Pfreimd , Upper Palatinate , † September 29, 1882 in Pisa ) was a German physician , ophthalmologist and anthropologist .

family

Franz Ignaz Pruner was a Catholic baptized son of Ignaz Brunner († 1822), head clerk at the royal rent office in Leuchtenberg / Upper Palatinate, and Katharina, née. Horchler from Mitterteich / Upper Palatinate.

education and profession

After successfully completing high school (1818–1825) in Amberg , the gifted student studied philosophy at the University of Munich for a year from 1826 and then switched to the medical faculty. His teachers included the anatomist and physiologist Ignaz Döllinger (1770–1841), the surgeon Johann Nepomuk von Ringseis and the internist Ernst von Grossi (1782–1829), who gave him an assistant position while still a student and promoted his medical training. Pruner graduated in 1830 with a medical license and doctorate. During a further training stay in Paris he met the French doctor Étienne Pariset (1770–1847), who was responsible for investigating plague epidemics in Egypt and who aroused Pruner's interest in the Orient. In 1831 Pruner joined a scientific expedition led by the Regensburg naturalist Karl von Hügel (1796-1870) and came to Egypt . There he was appointed by the Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali Pascha to the chair of anatomy and physiology at the medical school of Abuzabel near Cairo , which was founded in 1825 by the French doctor Antoine Barthélémy Clot ( called Clot Bey in Egypt ).

In 1832 Pruner returned to Munich to publish the works of his late teacher Grossi, but in 1833 he set out again for the south because the Munich university could not offer him a professional future. After studying at the clinic of the Tyrolean ophthalmologist Francesco Flarer (1791-1850) in Pavia , Pruner traveled on to Cairo and was appointed director of the military hospital in Esbekieh. Following a trip to the Arabian Peninsula, where he treated a member of the royal family as an ophthalmologist, Pruner was appointed director of the central hospitals in Cairo and Kasr-el-Aini as well as professor of ophthalmology, and in 1839 appointed personal physician to Abbas Pascha and with the rank and title of a Bey fitted.

In 1860 Pruner left Egypt for health reasons and settled in Paris, where he carried out exclusively phrenological , ethnographic and anthropological research. After the outbreak of the Franco-German War in 1870, he had to leave France, went to Pisa and lived there as a private scholar.

power

Pruner was extraordinarily versatile, scientifically gifted and devoted himself with equal care to medicine, ophthalmology, epidemiology , hygiene , linguistics , ethnology and ethnography as well as anthropology . As one of the first trained ophthalmologists of his time, he successfully treated up to 20,000 patients with epidemic infectious eye diseases ( conjunctivitis , trachoma ) with "Luxor water" (saturated zinc alum solution). In addition, he preferred to deal with inflammatory, mostly infectious diseases of the bandage - and cornea.

In Egypt and Arabia, he dealt with the major epidemics ( plague , cholera , typhus ), infectious ( syphilis , flu , smallpox , flaking , yellow fever , dengue fever ), tropical ( oriental bruises ), deficiency diseases ( scurvy , pellagra ), Zoonoses and parasite infections. In 1847 he first described pentastomiasis, a disease caused by a worm-shaped endoparasite , wrote a medical topography (physics report) and ethnography of Cairo and pointed out the importance of hygiene in combating the disease. After 1860, Pruner devoted himself mainly to anthropological research with a focus on craniology , taking more than 15,000 measurements on 507 skulls.

Pruner represented the "anti-contagionist" hypothesis of the cause of infection, which did not recognize the transferability of diseases, and worked as a physician during the transition period from natural philosophical to scientific principles after 1840.

Honors

Since 1835 he was an external corresponding member of the Académie nationale de médecine , since 1838 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . He was a member of the Société d'anthropologie de Paris from 1860 and its president in 1865. In 1872 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich.

Fonts

Signature of Franz Ignaz Pruner

Pruner's complete works include 12 medical and 124 anthropological and linguistic publications in French

• Tentamen de morborum transitionibus. Diss. Med., Munich 1830.
• Is the plague really a contagious evil? Munich 1839.
• The remnants of the ancient Egyptian human races. Munich 1841.
• The diseases of the Orient viewed from the standpoint of comparative nosology. Erlangen 1847.
• Topography médicale du Caire avec le plan de la ville et des environs. Munich 1847.
• The world epidemic cholera and nature's police force. Erlangen 1851.
• Man in space and in time. Munich 1859.

literature

• August Hirsch :  Pruner, Franz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 26, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1888, p. 675 f.
• Anton Schäfer: Life and work of the doctor Franz Pruner. In: Janus . Volume 35, 1931, pp. 249-277, 297-311, 335-343, 360-375; Janus . Volume 36, 1932, pp. 59-70, 114-127.
• August Hirsch (Hrsg.): Biographical lexicon of the outstanding doctors of all times and peoples. 2nd Edition. Volume 4, Berlin 1932, Volume 4, p. 682.
• Gottlieb Olpp : Outstanding tropical doctors in words and pictures. Munich 1932, p. 334.
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography . Volume 11, 1975, pp. 177-179.
• Wolfgang Raff: German ophthalmologists in Egypt. Diss. Med. TU Munich 1984, pp. 27-47.
• Eberhard J. Wormer :  Pruner, Franz Ignaz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , pp. 747 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Estate in the Bavarian State Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Klaus Reder : Physikatsberichte. 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. 1156 f .; here: p. 1156 ("Physics reports or medical topographies are descriptions by doctors that contain the most complete possible representation of the health and disease conditions of the population in connection with the geographical environment [...] as well as the social, cultural and ethnic phenomena" ).