Hans Winterstein (doctor)

Hans Winterstein (born  July 31, 1879 in Prague in Bohemia ; †  August 18, 1963 in Munich ) was a German physiologist and from 1941 also of Turkish nationality. From 1911 to 1927 he worked in Rostock , from 1927 to 1933 in Breslau and in Turkey from 1934 to 1953 at the University of Istanbul , where he also worked as a science organizer. From 1956 he did research as a visiting professor at the University of Munich .

His research focused on the physiological role of oxygen and the regulation of breathing . To this end, he formulated the so-called “Winterstein reaction theory” for the first time in 1910, which he revised several times in later publications. In recognition of his work, he was accepted into the Leopoldina on May 12, 1922 ( matriculation no. 3462 ) and in 1951 made an honorary member of the German Physiological Society . In addition, he received honorary doctorates from several universities and in 1955 the Great Federal Cross of Merit .

Life

Time in Rostock and Breslau

Hans Winterstein was born in 1879 as the son of the manufacturer and imperial councilor Wilhelm Winterstein and Emilie Winterstein, née. Edle von Bronneck, born in the Bohemian capital Prague , where he also attended the humanistic German grammar school there from 1889 and graduated from high school in 1897. He then studied 1897-1903 medicine at Prague's Charles-Ferdinand University , at the University of Jena and at the University of Goettingen , among other things, in which working in Jena and later in Göttingen physiologist Max Verworn , and was in his hometown of Prague 1903 Ph.D. . He then worked as a research assistant at Verworn at the Physiological Institute of Göttingen University and, from 1905, at the Physiological Institute of Kiel University . On August 30, 1904, he married Isabella Marie Wilhelmine Lambert (1876–1963) in Göttingen, with whom he had sons Carl Edwin Winterstein Lambert (1906–1990) and Hans Henry Winterstein Gillespie (1910–1994; father of the singer and actress Dana Gillespie ) had. In 1906, under Oscar Langendorff , he obtained his habilitation in (comparative) physiology at the University of Rostock with a thesis on the mechanism of tissue respiration , where he then worked initially as a private lecturer and from 1910 as a professor.

At the age of 31, he was appointed full professor of physiology and director of the Physiological Institute there in 1911 as the house- appointed successor of Willibald Nagel . From then on he took part in every conference and every international congress of physiologists. During his time in Göttingen and Rostock, Hans Winterstein also made several stays at the Naples Zoological Station . He was also politically active and belonged to the German Democratic Party of the Rostock Citizens' Representation and from January 1919 to June 1920 the constituent state parliament of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin , in which he campaigned for bourgeois parliamentary democracy. In 1927 he followed an appointment at the University of Breslau to the chair of physiology there, which had previously held, among others, Jan Evangelista Purkyně and Rudolf Heidenhain . Winterstein was the director of the Breslau Physiological Institute until 1933.

Emigration to Turkey

After the National Socialists came to power , Hans Winterstein was suspended from lecturing in 1933 due to his father of Jewish origin, although he himself had stated his religion as Roman Catholic . In the same year, at the age of 54, following an invitation from the Turkish government, he took over a guest position at the University of Istanbul , to which he finally moved the following year after his release from his post in Wroclaw. His wife, who initially accompanied him to Turkey , later followed their two sons who were studying in England and divorced in 1938.

Hans Winterstein became a full professor of physiology at the Medical Faculty of Istanbul University and founding director of the Physiological Institute there. He gave his lectures first with the help of an interpreter and later himself in Turkish , in which he also wrote textbooks in the following years . In exile , he also met his second wife. Winterstein devoted himself to basic research with great energy and made general physiology an independent examination and teaching subject in Turkey. After initial difficulties in acclimatizing, he later felt at home in his host country, where he found recognition and received citizenship in 1941 . Among the German scientists who had emigrated to Turkey and who were involved in the modernization of universities and education initiated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , Hans Winterstein received the most contract extensions alongside the astronomer Wolfgang Gleißberg , who stayed in the country until 1958.

Return to Germany

Winterstein retired from the University of Istanbul in 1953 and returned to Germany in 1956 at the age of 77 on an invitation to Munich, where he took on a visiting professorship at the Institute for Physiology at the University of Munich and worked in research until a few weeks before his death. Several times a year he visited Turkey and recovered in his house on the Bosphorus from the "exertions and strains" in Munich. In autobiographical memories he described his time in Munich as the “happy end” of his life. In 1963 he died there of a heart disease.

Scientific work

Physiological role of oxygen

Hans Winterstein initially dealt with the physiology of the central nervous system and with examinations of fatigue and muscle rigidity and, until he moved to Breslau, anesthesia . In addition, there were studies in the field of comparative (compare) physiology on blood gases in sea animals, the regulation of breathing and cardiac physiology . The unifying aspect of this thematically diversified work was the investigation of the importance of oxygen and the effects of an oxygen deficiency. He was able to show that the organs of higher living beings function for some time even in the absence of oxygen, and that this is not based on oxygen reserves in the cells , as Max Verworn among others suspected .

His results were therefore fundamental for the distinction between aerobic and anaerobic processes of energy metabolism in the tissues of higher animals. His research also resulted in methodical work which he published in various handbooks, among other things. So early on, during his time in Rostock, he dealt with the possibilities of measuring oxygen consumption in nerve tissue , which made him an expert in this field and also laid important foundations for neurological research.

Reaction theory of respiratory regulation

Building on his own research results and the findings of other scientists such as John Scott Haldane , Hans Winterstein developed a theory of the chemical regulation of respiration in mammals, which he first presented in 1910 . This was known in the professional world as "Winterstein's reaction theory" and marked the beginning of the explanation of the physiological control of breathing in the 20th century. Its central element was the assumption that carbon dioxide via an acidification of the liquid in the extracellular space of the respiratory center stimulates respiration. The pH value in the respiratory center would in turn be influenced both by the pH value in the blood and by breathing itself, which in this theory represents a regulator . Hans Winterstein explained the effect of a lack of oxygen through hydrogen ions , which resulted from incompletely oxidized metabolic products.

In later work on this topic, which accompanied him throughout his scientific career, he took into account the findings of other researchers such as the later Nobel Prize winner Corneille Heymans . These revisions and additions to his theory mainly concerned the anatomical position of the sensors for the chemical control of respiration and the role of the blood-liquor barrier for the effect of carbon dioxide, while the central physicochemical assumptions remained unchanged. In 1955 he published a monographic treatise on the chemical control of respiration in the series “Results of Physiology, Biological Chemistry and Experimental Pharmacology” . Further studies by other scientists on the effect of the concentration of hydrogen ions in the cerebrospinal fluid , carried out by Isidoor Leusen on dogs and by John Pappenheimer on goats, among others , confirmed the fundamental correctness of Hans Winterstein's ideas.

Awards

The honors that Hans Winterstein received for his research included honorary doctorates from the medical faculties of the universities of Heidelberg and Cologne and the natural sciences faculty of the University of Munich. As early as 1922, at the age of 43, he was accepted into the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina . Of the 35 Leopoldina members of Jewish descent who left Germany after 1933, he was the only one next to the botanist Ernst Pringsheim who returned after the end of the Second World War.

Hans Winterstein was also made a corresponding member of the Reale Accademia Medica di Roma and in 1951 an honorary member of the German Physiological Society . In 1955, the German ambassador to Turkey presented him with the Federal Cross of Merit . In the same year, Hans Winterstein gave the Edward Kellogg Dunham Lectures for the Promotion of the Medical Sciences at Harvard University .

Publications (selection)

Winterstein wrote 100 books before he emigrated to Turkey and there also 100 writings.

• Human physiology. Four volumes. Jena 1905–1911 (translation from Italian and German arrangement)
• Handbook of Comparative Physiology. Four volumes (bound in eight books). Jena 1910–1925 (as editor)
• The meaning of anesthesia for general physiology. Berlin 1919 (second edition 1926)
• Causality and vitalism. 2nd Edition. Wroclaw 1928.
• Sleep and dream. Berlin 1932 (second edition 1953); New edition (= Understandable Science. Volume 18). Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
• Recent studies on the theory of anesthesia. Volume 1. Moscow 1936.
• Animal Fiziyoloji Dersleri. [Textbook of Animal Physiology] Translated by Sadi Irmak. Istanbul 1939 (= İstanbul Üniversitesi Yayimlariadan. Volume 77); 2nd edition ibid 1943.
• with Meliha Terzioğlu: Fiziyloji dersleri. Istanbul 1946; 2nd edition, ibid. 1951.

literature

• Hans H. Weber and Hans H. Loeschcke: In Memoriam Hans Winterstein. In: Results of Physiology, Biological Chemistry and Experimental Pharmacology . Volume 55. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg and New York 1964, pp. 1–27 (with bibliography).
• Heidrun Kiwull-Schöne: The "Reaction Theory" of Hans Winterstein (1879–1963) in the Light of Today's Research on the Ventrolateral Medulla. In: C. Ovid Trouth, Richard Millis, Heidrun Kiwull-Schöne, Marianne Schläfke: Ventral Brainstem Mechanisms and Control of Respiration and Blood Pressure. Series: Lung Biology in Health and Disease. Volume 82. Marcel Dekker, New York 1995, ISBN 0-82-479514-8 , pp. 1-39.
• Donald B. Tower: Hans Winterstein. In: Webb Haymaker, Francis Schiller: The Founders of Neurology: One hundred and forty-six Biographical Sketches by eighty-eight Authors. Second edition. Thomas, Springfield IL 1970, pp. 307-311.
• Winterstein, Hans. In: Walther Killy, Rudolf Vierhaus: German Biographical Encyclopedia. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-59-823186-5 , Volume 10, pp. 535/536.
• Ali Vicdani Doyum: Alfred Kantorowicz with special consideration of his work in İstanbul (A contribution to the history of modern dentistry). Medical dissertation, Würzburg 1985, pp. 50 and 81-84.

Further publications

• Hans Winterstein: Sketches from my life. In: "Doctors of our time in self-portrayals" in the journal Hippokrates - Scientific Medicine and Practical Medicine in the Progress of Time. 33 (2 )/1962. Hippokrates-Verlag, pp. 79-83, ISSN  0018-2001 (autobiographical memoirs).
• Wolfgang Kimenkowski: The technical-apparatus set of instruments for the development of the reaction theory on the chemical respiratory regulation by the physiologist Hans Winterstein (1879-1963). Dissertation at the Medical Faculty of the Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum 1999.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Winterstein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Hans Winterstein (physician) in the state bibliography MV
• Entry on Hans Winterstein in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member entry by Hans Winterstein (with picture) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on September 11, 2017.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Ali Vicdani Doyum: Alfred Kantorowicz with special consideration of his work in İstanbul (A contribution to the history of modern dentistry). 1985.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} All information on life, work and honors are based, unless otherwise noted, on the obituary published in 1964 by Hans H. Weber and Hans H. Loeschcke (see literature)
4. ↑ ^{a b} Entry on Hans Winterstein in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium
5. ^ Albrecht Scholz, Caris-Petra Heidel: Emigrant fate: Influence of Jewish emigrants on social policy and science in the receiving countries. Series: Medicine and Judaism. Volume 7. Mabuse-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-93-596438-2 , p. 84
6. ↑ ^{a b} Physiology is a Must-Have in a Modern Medical School. In: Arnold Reisman: Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision. New Academia Publishing, Washington 2006, ISBN 0-97-779088-6 , pp. 206/207
7. ↑ Michael Goerig, Alwin Eduard Goetz: collaborators and editors of Jewish origin of the first German anesthesia magazines: Your fate under National Socialism and the attempt at a biographical appreciation. In: The anesthesiologist. Volume 59, No. 9, 2010, pp. 818-841, here: pp. 837 f.
8. ↑ Donald B. Tower, Springfield IL 1970, pp. 307-311 (see literature)
9. ^ ^{A b} John E. Remmers: A Century of Control of Breathing. In: American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. 172 (1 )/2005. American Thoracic Society, pp. 6-11, ISSN  1073-449X
10. ^ Benno Parthier , Dietrich von Engelhardt: 350 years of Leopoldina - aspiration and reality: Festschrift of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina: 1652–2002. German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Halle 2002, ISBN 3-92-846645-3 , p. 243
11. ^ Scientists in the News. In: Science . Volume 122. Edition 3173 of October 21, 1955, p. 756 doi : 10.1126 / science.122.3173.754

This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 3, 2012 in this version .