Friedrich Suter

Friedrich "Fritz" Suter (* 1870 in Basel ; † July 30, 1961 there ) was a Swiss urologist, surgeon and professor at the University of Basel .

Life

Suter's father Friedrich (1833–1873) came from a respected family in Zofingen , grew up in eastern Switzerland and settled down as a businessman in Basel. Two of Suter's uncles worked as officers abroad. The mother Marie (1845–1945) came from a respected family in Basel, her father was Adolf Christ-Sarasin and after the early death of their father, the four children grew up with their grandfather. Suter was closely associated with his mother throughout his life, she died in 1945 at the age of 100. Suter studied medicine in Basel with the state examination in 1895. The formative teachers included the zoologist Ludwig Rütimeyer and the physiologist Friedrich Miescher , under whose suggestion he carried out early studies with two fellow students as a student on the influence of the high mountain climate on the organism. Miescher was a pioneer in biochemistry, but died in 1895.

Family grave. Cemetery on the Hörnli

From 1895 Friedrich Suter was assistant to Hermann Immermann at the medical clinic for two years , at which the senior physician Alfred Jaquet influenced him. In 1897 Suter published a work on the behavior of the aortic circumference under physiological conditions and showed, among other things, that the ductility decreases with age. In 1897 he switched to the surgical department and was assistant to the surgeon August Socin until 1899 , who also performed urological interventions such as prostatectomies for benign prostate enlargements . Socin died of typhus, while Suter looked after him (he also made the correct diagnosis) and became seriously ill with typhus himself . After he recovered, he was employed in his private clinic in Basel by the surgeon and urologist Emil Burckhardt , who at the time advocated the independence of urology.

After Burckhardt's death in 1905, Suter ran the clinic together with the surgeon Ernst Hagenbach. In 1913 the clinic was rebuilt (Sonnenrain Clinic), which he ran with Hagenbach and two gynecologists . Suter completed his habilitation in 1906 and became an associate professor in 1917 with a teaching position for general surgery. In 1935 he became a full professor , but was not given a department of his own at the Basel Citizens' Hospital (then the University Hospital). Only his successor Heinrich Heusser (1894–1967) finally established urology in Basel when he became chief physician of the newly founded second surgical clinic at the Bürgerspital in 1945 . The center of Suter's work remained his private clinic.

Together with Franz Volhard, Friedrich Suter edited volume 6 (kidneys and lower urinary tract) of the second edition of the manual of internal medicine (1931) and he also edited the fourth edition, which appeared in 1951 when he was 81 years old.

He was a founding member of the German Society for Urology and the International Society for Urology. In 1944 he was the founding president of the Swiss Society for Urology and in 1947 he organized the first post-war congress of the International Society for Urology in St. Moritz , in which English, French and German urologists took part. He was active well into old age and continued to operate until 1960. After that, a fracture of a forearm caused his health to decline.

In 1900 he married Clara Vischer, with whom he had five sons and three daughters. His son Emanuel Suter (1918–2014), the youngest child, was a professor of microbiology at Harvard Medical School and at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Friedrich Suter found his final resting place in the Hörnli cemetery .

literature

• Adolf Lukas Vischer: Professor Dr. med. Fritz Suter (1870–1961), in: Basler Stadtbuch, Christoph Merian Foundation 1963, online

Web links

• History of urology at the University of Basel