Gerhard Küntscher

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Gerhard Küntscher (born December 6, 1900 in Zwickau , † December 17, 1972 in Glücksburg (Baltic Sea) ) was a German surgeon. As the inventor of intramedullary nailing , he is one of the pioneers in surgical bone fracture treatment. The Gerhard Küntscher Prize of the International Association for Osteosynthesis is awarded every two years for outstanding research in the field of trauma surgery.

Life

Küntscher was the son of Gustav Hermann Küntscher (director of Louis Schönherr's loom factory in Chemnitz) and his wife Marie Therese nee. Gottschaldt. The engineer Wolfgang Küntscher was his younger brother.

After attending primary school and the Reform Realgymnasium, Küntscher studied medicine and natural sciences at the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg , the University of Hamburg and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena until 1925 . In 1926 he was in Jena summa cum laude for Dr. med. PhD . First he worked at the Medical University Policlinic in Jena and then from 1928 to 1930 at the Municipal Hospital in Freiberg ( radiology and internal medicine ).

Kiel

In order to become a visceral surgeon , he went to the renowned Kiel surgery under Wilhelm Anschütz in 1930 ; however, the privy councilor soon entrusted Küntscher with the injured and stimulated his interest in surgical bone fracture treatment. The unscheduled assistant position was remunerated with 280 Reichsmarks per month. Küntscher turned to National Socialism early on. Since 1931 he was a member of the NSDAP and the SA. In 1932 he was appointed SA sanitary standard leader. Habilitated in surgery in 1935 , Küntscher was appointed private lecturer in 1936 and associate professor in 1942 . After Anschütz retired , Küntscher was taken over by Wilhelm Fischer .

Second World War

When the order to enter the army came in April 1941 , Küntscher did not want to be deployed in the staff service , but rather at the front . For the morning roll call, he supposedly appeared in a doctor's smock, nightgown and service cap until his request was granted. Initially deployed on the Eastern Front, he was transferred to Finland at the end of 1942 . He headed a military hospital in Kemi for 22 months - and used his nail with such great success that it became the operational standard in Scandinavia. In 1947, Rehnberg published the results of the first 105 intramedullary nailings in Finland. In September 1944 Küntscher suddenly left Kemi "for Norway". As one of the first surgeons, Carl Häbler reported on his experience with intramedullary nailing as early as 1944. During the war Küntscher operated a British parachutist. Reginald Watson-Jones , consultant surgeon of the Royal Air Force , initially considered the nail to be an "experiment" and a violation of the Geneva Conventions ; but this innovation was soon understood and The Times extolled the new treatment.

Schleswig, Hamburg, Flensburg

Grave in the mill cemetery (sign removed in the meantime)

Sick of diphtheria , Küntscher was taken to a hospital in Schleswig in 1945 . Well again, he took over the management. The British military administration wanted to win him over (like Heinrich Dräger in Lübeck). In order to be able to stay in Schleswig despite the barren post-war period , Küntscher withdrew to the quarantine station of his hospital. Thanks to his initiative, the military hospital was expanded into a district hospital in 1948 and in 1951 the Hesterberg city hospital. In 1952 he nailed a horse's leg near Idstedt .

On April 10, 1957, Küntscher was appointed Medical Director of the Hamburg Harbor Hospital . Retired against his will in 1965, he was no longer dependent on the approval of Health Senator Walter Schmedemann for his lecture tours (Spain, USA) .

In order to be able to live in Schleswig-Holstein , but "as far away as possible from Hamburg", he moved to the Flensburg Fjord and from 1967 worked as a visiting doctor at the St. Franziskus Hospital in Flensburg. He died over the revision of his book at his desk in Glücksburg. His grave is in the mill cemetery in Flensburg.

Success and envy

Küntscher's nail after 47 years
Richard Maatz

Küntscher investigated the structure and function of bone tissue , demonstrated for the first time the flow of force in long bones in experiments and researched fracture healing and callus formation . He became world famous for his new implants and instruments.

With Ernst Pohl as congenial "artisans" Kiintscher pursued the development of intramedullary Bolzung for intramedullary nailing . After preliminary tests on domestic dogs he put them on 9 November 1939 for the first time in a human stem fracture of the femur a. The “inner splint for long bones” was patented by the Reich Patent Office on December 17, 1939 .

When he reported on the first thirteen cases at the 68th meeting of the German Society for Surgery in March 1940 in Berlin, Küntscher had to accept serious doubts and accusations (“metal beating”). But his boss Fischer supported him in a moderate and decisive manner.

The breakthrough came in World War II : in 1942, the medical service leaders of the Wehrmacht met in Krasnodar . Sauerbruch , Handloser , Frey , Böhler and Wachsmuth discussed the question of whether the new Küntscher nail should be introduced. Above all, the actually "conservative" Böhler brought about the positive decision.

Küntscher developed a metal detector to make it easier to find bullets and shrapnel in the wounded. Since there were no X-ray machines, the "Hosenjodler" were used in all hospitals . 1942 was Küntscher's year: he became a professor in Kiel, one of the most respected surgical clinics in Germany. Richard Maatz completed his Intramedullary Nailing Technique” (Leipzig 1945). In his manuscript The marrow nailing method , which he produced for the US Navy in 1947 , Küntscher wrote in the foreword that Maatz had written the text of the technique of marrow nailing alone. The Wehrmacht decided to use Küntscher's nail. It is no coincidence that he was transferred to the remote northeast of Finland at the end of such a year - especially since he caricatured diligent colleagues in his “parrot portfolio”.

Intramedullary nailing paved the way for stable osteosynthesis , which was achieved through improvements in X-ray machines such as B. the C-arm , could be further developed and thus contributed to the reduction of disabilities caused by bone fractures through their advances in fracture treatment.

Highly respected all over the world, Küntscher was too uncomfortable for academic orthodoxy - too successful and too independent. He was denied a chair . He never became a member of the German Society for Orthopedics and Traumatology , but remained loyal to the German Society for Surgery .

Honors

Mural by Johannes Grützke in the lecture hall of the Berufsgenossenschaftlichen Unfallkrankenhaus Hamburg on the history of trauma surgery. On the far right is Gawriil Abramowitsch Ilisarow , next to him in a green jacket Gerhard Küntscher

Works

  • The importance of the representation of the flow of forces in the bone for surgery . Archive for Clinical Surgery 182 (1935), pp. 489-551
  • The influence of tensile and compressive forces on fracture healing . Der Chirurg 8 (1936), pp. 440-445
  • Results and indication of femoral neck needling . Archives for orthopedic and trauma surgery 40 (1939), pp. 282–284 (39 Smith-Petersen-Nägel)
  • with Richard Maatz: intramedullary nailing technique . Leipzig 1945
  • Langenbeck's callus problem . Archive for Clinical Surgery 273 (1953), pp. 835-843
  • The Küntscher method of intramedullary fixation . Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery [Am] 40-A (1958), pp. 17-26
  • Voss' operation in coxarthrosis . Acta Orthopedica Belgica 26 (1960), pp. 248-250
  • The intramedullary nail of fractures . Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research 60 (1968), pp. 5-12
  • Intramedullary nailing of comminuted fractures . Langenbeck's Archive for Surgery 1968
  • Marrow nailing in pseudarthroses . Zentralblatt für Chirurgie 98 (1973), pp. 1041-1047

literature

  • Lorenz Böhler : Technique of bone fracture treatment in peace and in war . Maudrich-Fachverlag , Vienna 1945.
  • AT Cross: Gerhard Küntscher: a surgical giant . AO Dialogue, 2/2001 (with an unknown image of young people) Digitized version ( memento from July 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 359 kB).
  • Rüdiger Döhler , Dirk Hasselhof, Friedrich Hennig : Femoral nailing by Küntscher - a 74-year medical history . Der Chirurg 62 (1991), pp. 761-762.
  • Marlo Jörs, Friedrich Hennig: Gerhard Küntscher - a life that hits the nail on the head . Osteosynthesis International, Budapest 1991.
  • Г. В. Кустурова: ГЕРХАРД КЮНЧЕР: НАРОДЖЕННЯ БЛОКУЮЧОГО ОСТЕОСИНТЕЗУ [AV Kusturova: Gerhard Küntscher - the birth of locking osteosynthesis] Trauma, Donetsk 2009, pp. 354–356
  • Richard Maatz, W. Lentz, W. Arens (eds.): The intramedullary nailing and other intramedullary osteosynthesis. Stuttgart 1983.
  • Markwart MichlerKüntscher, Gerhard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , pp. 227-229 ( digitized version ).
  • Fritz Povacz: History of trauma surgery , 2nd edition. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 2007 digitized
  • WR Wolfers: Marrow nailing as a life's work by Gerhard Küntscher 1900–1972 . Diss. Univ. Kiel 1994.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Urs FA Heim: The AO phenomenon. Foundation and first years of the working group for the study of osteosynthesis . Verlag Hans Huber, Bern 2011, p. 18, ISBN 3-456-83638-4
  2. On the 100th birthday of Professor Dr. Gerhard Küntscher
  3. Dissertation: Examination of the kidney activity by determining the urea in saliva .
  4. Michael Grüttner , Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy, Heidelberg 2004, p. 102.
  5. from Nekrolog in Spiegel 53/1972.
  6. Rehnberg SV: Treatment of fractures and pseudarthroses with marrow nailing . Ann Chir Gynaec Fenn. 1947; 36: 2.
  7. ^ Friedrich HW Heuck: Research with X-rays: Balance of a Century (1895-1995) . Ed .: Friedrich HW Heuck. 1995, ISBN 3-540-57718-1 , pp. 54 .
  8. Flensburger Tageblatt : No space for Dr. Küntscher. Küntscher-Strasse becomes Schervier-Strasse , from: November 5, 2012, accessed on: March 1, 2015.
  9. Can a Nazi doctor name a street? , Flensburger Tageblatt dated: July 25, 2011, accessed on: March 1, 2015

Remarks

  1. Kurt Thimm (Kiel) Küntscher, now 83 years old, worked as a nurse for many years.
  2. The manuscript was published posthumously in 2000 as an archive find.
  3. Caricatures on intramedullary nailing, on the other hand, which are often attributed to Küntscher, mostly come from the so-called “nail book”, a birthday gift from his colleagues. The drawings from it mostly come from Küntscher's colleague friend Dr. Thiele from the neighboring children's department.