Georg Haas (physician)

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Georg Haas (born April 24, 1886 in Nuremberg , † December 9, 1971 in Gießen ) was a German doctor and a founder of hemodialysis . In 1924 he successfully carried out the world's first “blood wash” (as he called it) outside the body on patients . In January 1925, Haas published the description of the procedure in the Klinische Wochenschrift . Today 95 percent of all dialysis patients in Germany are treated with this method, and it is also the standard method worldwide.

Life

Georg Haas studied medicine in Munich and Freiburg im Breisgau . During his studies he became a member of the Zaringia Freiburg Academic Association . This was followed by his doctorate in 1911 and an assistant position at the Physiological-Chemical Institute of the University of Strasbourg from 1911 to 1913. Then he worked from 1914 to 1916 at the Medical Clinic of the University of Giessen and at the local hospital. In 1916 he received his habilitation and was a private lecturer. 1917–1918 he was in the medical service in Romania. In 1921 he received an extraordinary professorship at the University of Giessen and from 1924 to 1954 he was medical director at their medical polyclinic. During the Second World War, Haas also had to look after the hospitals in Gießen as a consultant internist. During the heavy air raid on Gießen in early December 1944, he was buried at home and rescued by an assistant. In 1950 Haas was still a full professor and in 1954 he retired.

In 1933 Georg Haas married Elisabeth Joeckel. He died in 1971 at the age of 85. The couple's grave is in the old cemetery in Gießen . The PHV Dialysis Center in Giessen was named Georg Haas Dialysis Center in honor of Georg Haas .

In the judgment of contemporaries, Georg Haas was a “good Catholic Christian”, “a very good and solid clinician”, “highly valued by colleagues and patients”, “calm and affable”, “personally undemanding and as a doctor and scientist of great modesty , He was denied the recognition he deserved for his (pioneering) achievements throughout his life ”(quoted from Benedum, medical historian in Gießen).

The development of blood washing

To develop blood washing, Dr. med. Georg Haas based on experiences during World War I , in which he repeatedly saw soldiers die of kidney inflammation with kidney failure without being able to be helped. He interpreted the clinical picture of the sick as self-poisoning. Haas remembered laboratory dialysis , a method that he had used to separate chemical substances from solutions during his medical training in Strasbourg with Professor Hofmeister. He used papyrus, peritoneum and finally collodion (nitrocellulose) as dialysis membranes . He was now wondering whether the uremia poisons could be removed from the patients' blood with the help of dialysis.

Haas had the idea that the blood could bypass a semipermeable membrane, on the other side of which there would have to be an aqueous liquid, so that toxins from the blood could migrate through the membrane into the aqueous liquid according to the concentration gradient . Haas first experimented on dogs in Gießen in 1915. He himself made collodion membranes in the form of tubes, constructed a suitable frame and guided the blood through the tubes, which were surrounded by a saline solution. As an anticoagulant, he used hirudin , which he himself had isolated from leeches . It was still so toxic that dogs died of intestinal bleeding. Because of this and because the course of the war took him to the Balkans, he broke off the experiments and only reported about them later.

In the early 1920s, Haas - delayed by the war - gained knowledge of animal experiments with hemodialysis that Abel, Rowntree and Turner had carried out in the USA in 1912/13 (not in cases of kidney failure). Haas also read that the Hamburg-based Necheless was treating dogs with hemodialysis that had both kidneys removed. He resumed his own animal experiments with the aim of treating uremia using hirudin, which was now better purified. The tests went in such a way that dialysis was justifiable in the patient.

Replica of the "Haas kidney"

Georg Haas used a self-developed "cabin system" consisting of 16 collodion tubes in eight glass containers, which functioned technically safely. As a precaution, Haas limited the (world's first) hemodialysis in humans to just 15 minutes in 1924. It went without complications. A blood pump was used for further treatments, but most importantly the dialysis times were extended. Haas was able to determine not only an improvement in laboratory parameters, but also the symptoms of purification in the patients. Their consciousness cleared, they lost their nausea, their high blood pressure dropped, and the shortness of breath improved. Haas also noticed that if he increased the blood-side pressure in the dialysis machine above that in the rinsing solution, he could withdraw fluid from the blood plasma and subsequently from the body tissue, especially the lungs, in the event of overhydration. He had discovered and used hemodialysis using ultrafiltration . When the beneficial anticoagulant heparin for thrombosis treatment came onto the market in the mid-1920s , Haas also used it successfully instead of hirudin for his blood washes from 1927 onwards. Haas had performed a total of 11 hemodialysis treatments by 1928 and published his experiences. Then his main job as clinic director so absorbed that he stopped the dialysis treatments. This decision may also have been due to the fact that he was attacked at a congress by the medical authority Franz Volhard because he could not cure the patient with dialysis, but only bring about a temporary improvement. This opinion was to be understood from time.

Badge in the lecture hall of the former Clinic for Internal Medicine of the Giessen University Hospital

In the 1940s, Willem Kolff was able to use cellophane tubes that were ideally suited as a dialysis membrane for his artificial kidney, which he developed together with Hendrik Berk, and have been available by the meter for sausage production since the 1930s ; as well as Nils Alwall , who from 1946 developed the first clinically really useful dialysis machine.

Today over 1.4 million people around the world survive with the help of regular machine blood washing, around 60,000 of them in Germany alone. The modest and reserved Georg Haas, who in 1924 created and used the first artificial organ in medical history with his dialysis machine, was forgotten and had to bring himself back to mind in 1952 with his pioneering work in an article in a scientific journal.

Works

  • Dialysing the flowing blood on the living. In: Clinical weekly. Volume 2, 1923, pp. 1888-1888
  • About washing blood. In: Clinical weekly. Volume 7, 1928, pp. 1356-1362
  • The method of washing blood (dialysis in vivo). In: E. Abderhalden (Ed.): Handbook of biological working methods. Dept. V, part 8, Berlin / Vienna 1935
  • Via the artificial kidney. In: German Medical Weekly. Volume 77, 1952, pp. 1640-1641

literature

  • Hermann Bach .: The development of the artificial kidney from hydrodiffusion and hemodialysis - from JA Nollet to G. Haas. The origin of the first artificial organ. Doctoral thesis in Giessen. Wilhelm-Schmitz-Verlag, Giessen 1983 (= work on the history of medicine in Giessen. Volume 7)
  • Jost Benedum and M. Weise: Georg Haas (1886–1971). His contribution to the early history of the artificial kidney. In: German Medical Weekly. Volume 103, 1978, pp. 1674-1676
  • Ulrike Enke: Georg Haas - pioneer of hemodialysis. In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt. Volume 104, 2007, A 2252-4 full text

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Black Ring. Membership directory. Darmstadt 1930, p. 63.
  2. ^ Georg Haas Dialysis Center of the PHV in Giessen.
personal data
SURNAME Haas, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, inventor of blood washing
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1971
Place of death to water