Franz Wilhelm Kauhlen

Franz Wilhelm Kauhlen (born January 27, 1750 in Hemmerden , † February 13, 1793 in Bonn ) was a German medic. He was the first to describe the healing power of the mineral fountain in Roisdorf near Bonn.

Live and act

Franz Wilhelm Kauhlen (portrait collection of the University Library Bonn)

Franz Wilhelm Kauhlen was born as the son of a large farming family in the village of Hemmerden on the Lower Rhine, then part of the imperial rule of Dyck, the residence of the Counts of Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck. After his first school lessons in Elsen , which is not far away , he attended the Jesuit grammar school in Neuss , then the Lautentiner grammar school in Cologne .

Kauhlen gave up the initially chosen study of "divine and legal scholarship" at the University of Cologne in 1771 in order to devote himself to the study of medicine at the Royal Brandenburg University of Duisburg . He became a student of the well-known physician and chemist Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost . In his inaugural dissertation in 1774, Kauhlen examined the Sauerbrunnen zu Roisdorf, which was owned by the Counts of Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck . The script praised its healing power as being on a par with the Lower Elder fountain and thus created the basis for the operation of the Roisdorf mineral fountain.

Kauhlen completed his training at the University of Strasbourg in order to establish himself as a general practitioner in the royal Cologne residence city of Bonn in 1775. At the beginning of 1776 he offered the first medical lectures there. With the title of Hofrat from the Electorate of Cologne, Kauhlen was appointed professor of medicine at the newly founded "Maxische Akademie" in Bonn a year later. From then on, Kauhlen supervised treatises on pathology and medical practice, but he continued to devote himself to medical work. In 1782 he was appointed garrison doctor on his own initiative. The new Elector Max Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen , who raised the Bonn Academy to a university, appointed Kauhlen to the chair of pathology in 1784. In 1786 Kauhlen was dean of the medical faculty, and in 1789 he became the third rector of Bonn University.

Kauhlen's self-expressed concerns were a logically exact working method, unbiased critical assessment and clear definition of terms for the medical field. In his scientific work, he proved to be a champion for improved hygiene and healthier living conditions, and was engaged in research into dysentery as well as wound and childbed fever. As a member of the Medical Council, he worked on a fundamental reform of the medical system in Kurköln.

Mineral fountain in Roisdorf 1826

In 1782, Kauhlen, as a decided representative of the Enlightenment , was the first of the Bonn professors to join the Illuminati . H. in their Minervalkirche Stagira, founded in the previous year . In addition to Kauhlen (order name "Tassilo"), court organist Christian Gottlob Neefe , Ludwig van Beethoven's teacher , Bonifaz Oberthür, the university's second rector, and other high-ranking personalities from court and university joined this order. After the Order of Illuminati was banned in 1785, Kauhlen and other former members came together again in the Bonn Reading and Recreation Society, which was founded in 1787 and still exists today . A connection to his friend Ludwig van Beethoven was established through the medical student Franz Gerhard Wegeler , who, according to family tradition, often played music in the Kauhlen house.

From 1777 Kauhlen was married to Anna Maria Kaufmann, the daughter of Bonn's mayor Peter Josef Kaufmann. The marriage resulted in three children: Lambert Joseph, later a medical officer in Zons , Matthias Franz, later forester in Gemünd , and Maria Agnes, who married Johann Adolph Steinberger , the long-time mayor of Cologne.

After the Elector Max Franz had fled the French revolutionary troops at the end of 1792, Kauhlen took care of the Imperial Austrian military stationed in Bonn as a garrison doctor. Here he became infected with "Lazareth fever " ( typhus ). He died at the age of 43 of this disease, for which as a scientist he had tried to find a cure.

literature

• Max Braubach: The first university in Bonn. Maxische Akademie and Electoral University 1774/77 to 1798. Bonn 1966, pp. 168–171.
• Norbert Zerlett: Roisdorf planned as the second Weltbad Spa in the foothills. A contribution to the history of bathing in the Rhineland. In: Godesberger Heimatblätter. No. 12 (1974), pp. 124-137.
• Paul Kaufmann, On the history of the Kaufmann families from Bonn and Pelzer from Cologne (PDF file)

Web links

• Franz Wilhelm Kauhlen (1750-1793) , heimatfreunde-roisdorf.de
• Franz Wilhelm Kauhlen