Gustav Edlefsen

Gustav Julius Friedrich Ferdinand Edlefsen (born February 24, 1842 in Friedrichstadt , † April 27, 1910 in Hamburg ) was a German doctor and university professor.

Live and act

Gustav Edlefsen was a son of the Friedrichstadt doctor Eduard Edlefsen (* 1803 in Oldenswort ; † February 27, 1854 in Itzehoe ) and his wife Louise Margaretha, probably born Edlefsen.

After his birth in Friedrichstadt, Edlefsen moved to Husum with his parents in 1850 and lived in Itzehoe from 1851 to 1858 . After visiting the Christianeum in Altona , which he left with the Abitur in 1862, he began studying medicine at the University of Kiel . In 1864/65 he continued his studies in Berlin and then went back to Kiel. In 1866 he worked as assistant to Victor Hensen at the Physiological Institute and in 1877 to Karl Heinrich Christian Bartels in the chemical laboratory of the medical clinic. He finished his studies in 1868 with the medical state examination.

After the state examination Edlefsen worked at the Medical Faculty of Kiel University. He was considered talented and reliable early on and was quickly assigned independent tasks. Immediately after the state examination, he took on a several-month prosecution at the Institute of Pathology , completing his doctorate with Victor Hensen. In 1868/69 he worked for several months as an assistant at the medical clinic. He then represented Adolf Georg Pansch as a prosector at the Anatomical Institute.

During the Franco-German War Edlefsen did military service and then moved to Kiel, where he set up his own practice. The medical clinic of the university employed him as a lecturer and in 1873, on Bartels recommendation, made him an extraordinary professor and director of the medical outpatient clinic, which had been located at Brunswicker Strasse 12 since 1869.

Patients, colleagues and students rated Edlefsen as a devoted physician who had a good technical knowledge and an excellent ability to observe and who worked selflessly for the patients. In addition to his activities as director of the medical outpatient clinic, which also included the municipal poor welfare department, he looked after internal patients in the third class of the Anschar house. This was since 1872 as the "motherhouse for the training of nurses" in Annenstrasse 63/69.

In 1890 Edlefsen's "Textbook on the Diagnosis of Internal Diseases for Students and Doctors" appeared, which made him widely known in the professional world. Due to his numerous lectures and participation in the medical examination committee, he fell ill with a chronic state of exhaustion. Therefore, in 1891, he withdrew from academic operations and relocated to Hamburg, where he occasionally worked as a consultant and in the medical association. During the last years of his life he suffered from a serious illness.

Edlefsen was married to Georgine Elise Friederike von Ahlefeld (born March 5, 1851 in Kiel , † May 9, 1915 in Hamburg), whose father Wilhelm von Ahlefeldt was provost of the Uetersen monastery . The couple had a son and a daughter.

literature

• Edith Feiner: Edlefsen, Gustav . in: Schleswig-Holstein Biographical Lexicon . Volume 4. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1976, pp. 63-64