Friedrich Karl Kleine

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Friedrich Karl Kleine
Friedrich Karl Kleine (signature) .jpg

Friedrich Karl Kleine (born May 14, 1869 in Stralsund ; † March 22, 1951 in Johannesburg , South Africa ) was a German microbiologist and pharmacologist . He is known for testing the first successful remedy for sleeping sickness .

Life

Kleine was born in Stralsund as the second child of district doctor Ludwig Wilhelm Kleine. He attended the Greifswald grammar school and the grammar school in Wohlau . After graduating from high school, he studied microbiology and pharmacology at the Friedrichs University in Halle . He then went to the Albertus University in Königsberg , but soon returned to Halle. There he dealt with pharmacology and biochemistry.

Africa

Kleine joined the Prussian Army as a medical officer and on January 15, 1900, joined the Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin , headed by Robert Koch . As a medical officer, he took over the management of the infection department at the Institute for Infectious Diseases in 1901. From 1906 to 1907 he accompanied Koch on his research trip into sleeping sickness in German East Africa . He later toured the Belgian Congo . In Rhodesia he married his assistant Hanna Okelmann, who had worked as a laboratory assistant at the Koch Institute for years. From 1908 to 1914, Kleine headed the fight against African trypanosomiasis in German East Africa. Initially he worked in the eastern and north-eastern fringes of Lake Victoria ( Mwanza and Musoma ). He also examined the northwestern area around Bukoba several times . In the end, Kleine moved his main area of ​​work to the Lake Tanganyika region because there were clearer signs of the existence of sleeping sickness here. In 1911/12 he suggested the establishment of a microbiological institute in the Imperial Hospital (later Ocean Road Hospital and from 1996 "Ocean Road Cancer Institute") in Dar es Salaam , which was also established there in 1912. In April 1914 he took over sleeping sickness research in Cameroon . He was drafted into the protection force and temporarily held the position of chief physician. At the same time he acted as a medical officer in the government when the regular job holder Heinrich Werner fell into British captivity. In February 1916, Kleine joined with the command of the Schutztruppe on neutral Spanish territory (Rio Muni) and was interned in Madrid until the end of the war. The sleeping sickness researcher Karl Rösener , who was also interned in Spain, also worked with him in Cameroon .

Berlin

After the World War he was head of department at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. While testing the drug Bayer 205 (suramin) against sleeping sickness, later marketed under the trade name Germanin, Kleine worked for Bayer AG and traveled to Rhodesia and Tanganyika from 1921 to 1923 in this context . In the Karama mission on Lake Tanganyika, Kleine met the first black African church doctor in East Africa, Adrian Atiman, who had been ransomed from slavery by the White Fathers and trained in Malta. In the same way, Kleine also met with Sir David Bruce , who in 1903 discovered the transmission of sleeping sickness in Uganda . From 1924 he was honorary professor for hygiene and tropical diseases at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin . In 1926 he became a corps bow bearer of the Normannia Hall . In 1926/27 he was a member of the League of Nations Commission for Research and Control of Sleeping Sickness. 1929–1930 he made an extensive research trip to Uganda and Tanganyika. On July 1, 1933, at the age of 64, he became the fourth President of the Cooking Institute, which he remained until the end of the war in 1945. He belonged on 4th / 5th March to the Berlin signatories of the confession of the German professors to Adolf Hitler in the Völkischer Beobachter . 1934-35 he stayed again in Tanganyika. As early as 1936/37 he traveled to Pretoria at the invitation of the Veterinary Research Institute . In 1938 he worked again in Tanganyika, where he stayed in Sikonge near Tabora . He returned to Germany shortly before the attack on Poland . On August 18, 1942, he was appointed an extraordinary member of the Scientific Senate of Army Medical Services.

During the Second World War , the little one lost her only son, just as the little sister lost her eldest son before Stalingrad . The house of Friedrich and Hanna Kleine on Berlin's Ahornstrasse was completely destroyed during a bomb attack. Then Kleine moved to Berlin-Hermsdorf and helped rebuild the Koch Institute. In 1948 he and his wife turned their backs on Germany forever. At the invitation of Prof. Dr. Ohrstein they went to South Africa, where Kleine died on March 22, 1951 in Johannesburg.

Friedrich Karl Kleine worked predominantly, like his teacher Robert Koch, in the area of ​​Lake Victoria and then in the region around Lake Tanganyika . His closest confidante in matters of sleeping sickness was the former military doctor Max Taute (later professor), who played a major role in research into sleeping sickness in East Africa. Under the guidance of Kleine, the first bacteriological institute was established at the German hospital in Dar es Salaam in 1912, but this lost its importance for tropical medicine during the British colonial era. This old laboratory still exists today at today's Ocean Road Cancer Institute as part of German-Tanzanian cancer research and control in Tanzania .

Honors

Works

  • A German tropical doctor . Hanover 1949.
  • Photo report on tests and the effectiveness of Bayer 205 . Bayer AG company archive, Leverkusen.

literature

  • Florian Hoffmann: Occupation and military administration in Cameroon. Establishment and institutionalization of the colonial monopoly of force. Part II: The Imperial Protection Force and its Officer Corps . Göttingen 2007, pp. 225-226
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 314
  • G [ottlieb] Olpp: Outstanding tropical doctors in words and pictures . Munich 1932, pp. 198f.
  • Heinrich Schnee : Deutsches Koloniallexikon , Leipzig 1920, p. 309

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 60/388
personal data
SURNAME Little one, Friedrich Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German microbiologist and pharmacologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Stralsund
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1951
Place of death Johannesburg , South Africa