Fritz Karl Bessel-Hagen

Fritz Karl Bessel-Hagen (born January 2, 1856 in Königsberg , † December 20, 1945 in Berlin ) was a German surgeon. He was largely responsible for the planning of the Westend Hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg and, as professor, founding director. As a medical student, Immanuel Kant was already involved in the reburial of 1880 in Königsberg Cathedral as a chronicler with two writings.

life and work

Fritz Karl Bessel-Hagen was a son of the Berlin city treasurer and later member of the Reichstag, Adolf Hermann Wilhelm Hagen . His grandfathers were the Königsberg professors for political economy Carl Heinrich Hagen and for astronomy Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel , his great-grandfather Karl Gottfried Hagen was a polymath and discussant of Immanuel Kant . His brother Ernst Bessel Hagen was professor of applied physics and later director of the second department of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt .

His son Hermann Hagen (1889–1976) was a geographer, from 1930 to 1957 first library director and from 1946 to 1957 director of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. His other son Erich Paul Werner Bessel-Hagen (1898-1946) was a professor of mathematics.

Bessel-Hagen studied in Königsberg and Berlin from 1876 to 1881, and became Dr. med. in Königsberg, in 1882 deputy assistant at the university gynecological clinic in Berlin, then assistant in the municipal hospital at Friedrichshain, in 1884 assistant in the surgical university clinic in Berlin and qualified as a lecturer in surgery in Heidelberg in 1886 and was appointed associate professor in 1889 . In 1888 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In 1891 he became director of the municipal hospital in Worms while continuing to teach in Heidelberg. From 1897 he became director of the city hospital in Charlottenburg. Until his retirement in 1922, he was medical director, administrative manager and director of the surgical department in the newly built Charlottenburg-Westend hospital (today: DRK Kliniken Berlin-Westend ).

Even as a student, Hagen wrote some anatomical articles. Due to his expertise and the close relationship between the Hagen family and Kant, Fritz Bessel Hagen was personally involved in the reburial of Kant in the Königsberg Cathedral. He made two writings on this historical event.

Charlottenburg-Westend Hospital

From 1899 onwards, Hagen was largely responsible for the planning and design of the Charlottenburg hospital. As an experienced hospital director, he already had a clear idea of ​​how such a facility would be based on the latest knowledge at the time. Hygiene and sterility should be established. For the first time, separate operating theaters and a new ventilation system were taken into account. In 1901, when construction began, the government master builder Julius Boethke (1864–1917) and, in particular, the well-known hospital architect Heino Schmieden were entrusted with the project. The first patients were admitted to the new hospital as early as 1904, which became the model for modern hospital construction.

Honors

Kaiser Wilhelm II awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle for the decisive planning for the construction of the Charlottenburg-Westend hospital . Fritz Karl Bessel-Hagen was elected a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina in 1888 .

Fonts

• Immanuel Kant's grave. In: East Prussian monthly. 1880.
• with Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer : Immanuel Kant's skull. In: East Prussian monthly. 1881.
• Over the median palatal bulge. In: Berlin Society for Anthropology. 1879.
• Communication on the Development and Abnormalities of the Human Occiput. In: Academy of Sciences in Berlin. 1879.
• with Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer: skulls and skeletons of the anthropological collection at Königsberg i. Pr. In: Archive for Anthropology. 1880.
• To criticize and improve the angle measurements on the head, together with a report on the course and causes of normal synostosis on the skull. In: Archives for Anthropology. 1881.
• An ulcerative sarcoma of the jejunum in a child. In: Virchow's archive. XCIX, 1885.
• About the Pathol. of the clubfoot. In: XIV. Surgeons Congress. 1885.
• About congenital patella dislocations. In: Berlin Medical Society. 1886.
• About lateral dislocations of the thumb. In: Archives for Surgery. 1888.
• About defects in the lower and upper extremities. In: Negotiations of the Natural History-Medical Association in Heidelberg. 1889.
• The etiology and pathogenesis of clubfoot. Heidelberg 1889.
• About a case of a laryngofissure with extirpation of a round cell sarcoma below the vocal cords. In: Naturalists' Assembly. 1889.
• About bone and joint anomalies, especially in the case of partial gigantic stature and multiple cartilaginous exostoses. In: Archives for Surgery. 1890.

literature

• Julius Pagel : Bessel-Hagen, Fritz Karl . In: Biographical lexicon of outstanding doctors of the nineteenth century. Urban & Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna 1901, Sp.  159–160 .
• Richard Vieweg :  Hagen, Carl Ernst Bessel. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 471 ( digitized version ).
• DRK Kliniken Berlin (Ed.) 100 Years of the Westend Clinics 1904–2004. Berlin 2004, DNB 1058139061 .
• Eva Brinkschulte, Thomas Knuth (ed.): The medical Berlin: A city guide through 300 years of history . Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-8148-0178-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Born as Fritz Carl Bessel Hagen , changed to Bessel-Hagen from 1920 in honor of his grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel .
2. ^ Gunnar Stollberg et al. (Ed.): Hospital history today. What does it mean and at what end do you study hospital and hospital history? Lit, Berlin 2011, p. 169 ff.
3. ^ Leopoldina: Fritz Karl Bessel-Hagen .