Franz Quiver
Franz Köcher (born December 27, 1916 in Auma ; † November 18, 2002 in Berlin ) was a German ancient orientalist and medical historian .
Live and act
Franz Köcher spent most of his scientific career in Berlin. Born in Thuringia, he is known in specialist circles primarily for his multi-volume work Babylonian-Assyrian Medicine in Texts and Studies (BAM).
After graduating from high school in Gera in 1936, Franz Köcher began studying ancient history, oriental philology and philosophy in Jena. This study was interrupted from October 1938 by army service and was only to be supplemented by a short study leave at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in the winter semester 1941/42 until the end of the war . After a brief period as a prisoner of war in the US Army, Franz Köcher worked temporarily as a school helper until he was able to resume studies in Berlin in 1946. This is where the decisive influence of his teacher Erich Ebeling on the later research life of Franz Köchers began. Ebeling was also Kocher's doctoral supervisor for the doctorate that followed on March 7, 1949. Phil. For Assyriology, Oriental Philology and Ancient History. The topic of the dissertation was: Incantations against the demon Lamaštu . From May 1949 on, Köcher worked as a research assistant and from October 1952 as a research assistant at the Institute for Orient Research at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin . When the Wall was built in 1961 , however, he was forced to give up the job because he lived in West Berlin . At this point, however, the intensive work of the previous years had already laid the foundations for the main work of his research career, BAM.
Kocher's talent for creating autographs was already evident during his work on Erich Ebeling's volume Literary Cuneiform Texts from Assur (1953). He found access to cuneiform medicine, among other things, by working on cuneiform texts on Assyrian-Babylonian drug and herbal medicine (1955), which mainly dealt with the pharmacological series URU.AN.NA.
From December 1961, Franz Köcher was able to continue his work on medical cuneiform texts with the help of a grant from the German Research Foundation . In May 1963 he became a research assistant at the Institute for History at the Free University of Berlin , where he spent most of his scientific career. After his habilitation in January 1967, he was awarded the Venia legendi by the Medical Faculty of the Free University . Until his retirement in March 1983 he was an active lecturer and had a decisive influence on medical professionals as well as historians and classical scholars in their careers.
His main work, The Babylonian-Assyrian Medicine In Texts And Investigations (BAM) , accompanied Franz Köcher through his entire scientific career and is today one of the main works for the scientific development of ancient Mesopotamian medicine. During Kocher's active career, Volumes 1 and 2 appeared in 1963, Volume 3 in 1964, Volume 4 in 1971, and Volumes 5 and 6 in 1980. Volumes 7 and 8 were written by Markham J. Geller. They appeared in 2005 and 2015.
Web links
- Transliterations of the texts from BAM on the homepage of the BabMed project
Individual evidence
- ^ Institute for the History of Medicine
- ↑ Helmut Freydank : Franz Köcher . In: Archive for Orient Research Vol. 50 (2003/2004), pp. 507–509
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Quiver, Franz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German ancient orientalist and medical historian |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 27, 1916 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Auma |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 18, 2002 |
| Place of death | Berlin |