Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt

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Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt, around 1920

Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (born June 2, 1885 in Harburg ; † December 30, 1964 in Munich ) was a German psychiatrist, neurologist and neuropathologist. He is one of the two namesake for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease , an incurable brain disease . Creutzfeldt was an outstanding brain researcher and co-founder of an anatomically founded psychiatry.

Life

Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt's father Otto Creutzfeldt (1857–1935) was a doctor and medical adviser in Harburg . He worked as a doctor for the company health insurance fund of the Harburg rubber factory Heinrich Traun & Sons .

Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt studied medicine from 1903 to 1908 at the universities of Jena , where he became a member of the Germania fraternity in 1903 , Rostock and Kiel , where he received his doctorate in 1909. After training in tropical medicine, Creutzfeldt went on long journeys to the Pacific Ocean as a ship's doctor.

In 1912 he decided to become a brain researcher . He worked in the St. Georg Hospital in Hamburg, in the Neurological Institute in Frankfurt am Main , at the psychiatric-neurological clinics in Breslau with Alois Alzheimer , in Kiel with Ernst Siemerling and in Berlin at the Charité with Karl Bonhoeffer and at the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. During the First World War , Creutzfeldt was deployed as a naval staff doctor in the reserve and survived the sinking of the auxiliary cruiser SMS Greif on which he was embarked. After his capture on February 29, 1916, he was repatriated as a doctor in May of that year and served in the Imperial Navy until the end of the war in 1918 .

Creutzfeldt was married to Clara (Cläre) Sombart, a daughter of the sociologist and economist Werner Sombart . The marriage resulted in two daughters and three sons, including the gastroenterologist Werner Creutzfeldt (1924-2006), full professor at the Georg-August University of Göttingen , and the neurologist Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt (1927-1992).

plant

Creutzfeldt completed his habilitation in 1920 in Kiel and worked as the first assistant doctor at the local psychiatric and mental hospital under Ernst Siemerling . In Kiel, Creutzfeldt turned to neuropathology and was able to describe two inflammatory diseases of the brain for the first time. In 1924 he switched to the Berlin Charité under Karl Bonhoeffer as the first senior assistant doctor and headed the brain anatomy laboratory there. In 1925 he was appointed associate professor .

In 1913, Creutzfeldt researched the clinical picture and the pathological changes in the brain in a previously unknown disease in a young patient at the Breslau University Mental Clinic, which was headed by Alois Alzheimer . The woman suffered from speech disorders, confusion and muscle twitching before she died shortly afterwards. Creutzfeldt was only able to publish the description of this disease, as he was drafted during World War I, in 1920 and 1921, shortly before the Hamburg neurologist Alfons Maria Jakob , who had noticed similar symptoms in patients. In 1922 the term Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was introduced. With two other clinical pictures he succeeded in clarifying organic brain change processes as a correlate of psychopathological states; he became one of the pioneers of modern biological psychiatry.

In 1938 Creutzfeldt was appointed professor to the Kiel chair for neurology and psychiatry and at the same time took over the management of the university mental hospital there, where he worked until 1953.

time of the nationalsocialism

During the National Socialist era , Creutzfeldt did not join the NSDAP . His political stance towards the regime is described as "reserved but not indiscriminately negative"; he was considered "German-national". He was a candidate for the National Socialist German Medical Association and a supporting member of the SS .

As a medical assessor at the Berlin Hereditary Health Court , he was involved in decisions on forced sterilization . During the National Socialist "euthanasia" programs Aktion T4 and Aktion Brandt , 605 patients from the Kiel clinic were transferred to state hospitals. 135 of these patients were then deported to killing centers, of which at least 65, but probably more than 100, were murdered. Creutzfeldt later saw himself as a decided “opponent of insane murders”. Creutzfeldt also provided expert opinions in military court proceedings. A case of a marine is documented who was executed because of Creutzfeldt's certainty of sanity. Likewise, however, people were saved from concentration camp imprisonment through his reports.

post war period

After the end of the war, Creutzfeldt was the first post-war rector of Kiel University for six months. His efforts to rebuild the university caused some conflicts with the British occupying forces , which accused him of hiring too many lecturers who were actually or potentially war criminals. He was dismissed from some offices by the British military government when he opposed an order restricting the enrollment of former Wehrmacht officers. After his retirement in 1953, Creutzfeldt went to Munich and worked there on a research assignment for the Max Planck Society . In December 1954, he wrote to the President of the Regional Social Court in Schleswig that the doctor "Fritz Sawade" who was employed as an expert at the court was actually Werner Heyde . Heyde was the medical director of Aktion T4 from 1939 to 1941 and was wanted by the police for his involvement in the murder of the disabled and the mentally ill. The president of the court handed the letter back to Creutzfeldt without taking action against Heyde. Creutzfeldt also failed to share his knowledge with the search authorities. Heyde was able to practice as an expert until November 1959.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Otto Creutzfeld short biography in the newsletter of the DRK Landesverband Hamburg, 2nd edition, May 2014, p. 5.
  2. ^ Ernst Elsheimer (ed.): Directory of the old fraternity members according to the status of the winter semester 1927/28. Frankfurt am Main 1928, p. 75.
  3. ↑ See the entry of Hans-Gerhard Creutzfeldt's matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
  4. ↑ Sabine Schuchert: Creutzfeldt and Jakob were both on the track of a riddle (= famous discoverers of diseases. ) In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . Volume 116, Issue 49, December 6, 2019, [p. 60] ( end point ), link .
  5. ↑ a b Jörn Henning Wolf: Great researchers from the fjord: Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt . (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) Undated, accessed on November 12, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b c Michael Legband : Caught in the system ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) . In: Schleswig-Holsteinisches Ärzteblatt 9/2001 , pp. 15-16.
  7. ^ Klaus-Detlef Godau-Schüttke: The Heyde / Sawade affair. How lawyers and medical professionals covered the Nazi euthanasia professor Heyde after 1945 and remained unpunished. 2nd Edition. Nomos, Baden-Baden, 2001. ISBN 3-7890-7269-9 . Page 132–149.
personal data
SURNAME Creutzfeldt, Hans Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neurologist; Discoverer of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Harburg , Hanover Province
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1964
Place of death Munich