Georg von Wedekind (physician)

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Georg Wedekind around 1800

Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind , since 1809 Freiherr von Wedekind , (born January 8, 1761 in Göttingen , † October 28, 1831 in Darmstadt ) was a German doctor and revolutionary.

family

Georg Freiherr von Wedekind belongs to the Wedekind family of Horst , which also includes the writer Frank Wedekind . He is the son of the Göttingen professor Rudolph Wedekind and father of the important Hessian forest official Georg Wilhelm Freiherr von Wedekind . The writer and translator Meta Forkel-Liebeskind is his sister. The politicians Georg Freiherr von Wedekind and Wilhelm Freiherr von Wedekind are his grandchildren, the resistance fighter Arnd Freiherr von Wedekind his great-grandson.

Life

Georg Wedekind studied in Goettingen medicine and was already as a 19-year-old Doctor of Medicine doctorate . In 1787 he was appointed personal physician to Elector Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal in Mainz and was appointed extraordinary professor and councilor. He is one of the founders of the Mainz Polyclinic.

In 1792 and 1793 Georg Wedekind was involved in the founding of the Mainz Jacobin Club and belonged to the inner circle of the Mainz Jacobins . He became a military doctor with the Rhine Army and at the military hospital in Strasbourg, where he translated into German three deliveries of a 44-part collection of speeches by François-Martin Poultier, which were to be used for the cult of the decade . However, there was no support for this project and the translations were discontinued. In the following years he worked mainly in the military medical field. Many of his professional and political expectations remained unfulfilled. In 1808 he said goodbye to the military. Appointed to the secret council and personal physician of the Hessian Grand Duke Ludwig I in Darmstadt, he managed to cure the monarch , who was seriously ill with typhus .

Wedekind was raised to the hereditary Grand Ducal Hessian baron on May 16, 1809. In 1830 he was appointed to the Privy Council of State. On February 5, 1792 Georg Christian Theodor von Wedekind with the academic surname Erasistratus III. admitted to the Leopoldina as a member (matriculation number 949) .

He was accepted into the Masonic Lodge Maximilian zu den Drei Lilien in Cologne in 1785 and was later active in the Lodges Caroline zu den Drei Pfauen in Neuwied and Les amis réunis in Mainz, and in 1816 co-founder and first master of the chair of the Darmstadt Lodge Johannes Evangelist zur Eintracht . After only a year he fell out with the Darmstadt Lodge and joined the Worms Lodge at the reconstructed Temple of Brotherly Love . This appointed him "old and honor chair master".

Wedekind was one of the first in Germany to advocate vaccination against smallpox and published numerous treatises on medical, political and philosophical topics as well as on nobility and Freemasonry .

Georg Freiherr von Wedekind

Awards

literature

  • Martin Weber: Georg Christian Gottlieb Wedekind 1761–1831, career and fate of a doctor in the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. (= Soemmerring research , volume 4), Gustav Fischer, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-437-30547-6 (dissertation University Mainz 1985, 465 pages, extensive bibliography).
  • Franz Dumont : The Republic of Mainz from 1792/93. 2nd edition, Verlag der Rheinhessischen Druckwerkstätte, Alzey 1982, ISBN 3-87854-035-3 (A Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral) Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 1978, XII, 546 pages, "... appears simultaneously in of the Alzeyer Geschichtsblätter series, special issue 9 ").
  • Anne Cottebrune: Myth et réalité du "jacobinisme allemand" . Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses, Lille 2005, ISBN 2-284-04884-6 ( reviewed by Susanne Lachenicht , Historical Seminar, University of Hamburg [PDF; 64 kB ]).
  • Karl Georg Bockenheimer , Julius PagelWedekind, Georg Christian . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 41, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, pp. 396-398.
  • Johann Daniel Ferdinand Neigebaur : History of the imperial Leopoldino-Carolinische German academy of natural scientists during the second century of its existence. Friedrich Frommann , Jena 1860, p. 239 (archive.org) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. François-Martin d'Poultier Elmotte: Discourse décadaires pour toutes les fêtes de l'année républicaine. Paris, on the II – III.
  2. Decade talk to all parties of the Republican Calendar by civil Poultier. translated by Citizen G. Wedekind, Strasbourg to III.
  3. u. a. treated Wedekind Heinrich von Kleist .
  4. ^ Member entry by Georg Christian Theodor von Wedekind at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on December 3, 2017.
  5. see page of the Leopoldina with the award winners .