Heinrich Hornung

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Heinrich Kurt Felix August Ernst Hornung (born January 26, 1900 in Erndtebrück , North Rhine-Westphalia , † November 24, 1981 in Kassel ) was a German physician.

He was senior medical officer, senior government and medical councilor in Kassel and lecturer in public health and pharmaceutical law at the Philipps University of Marburg. He became known as the initiator and scientific companion of the first German attempt to fluoridate drinking water in the Kassel district of Wahlershausen.

life and work

His parents were the general practitioner, later an “active military doctor” and government medical advisor Julius Albert Heinrich Victor Hornung (1868–1958) and his wife Helene (1877–1966), née. Master builder. According to Hornung, the painter Lucas Cranach is one of the known ancestors on his father's side. After attending school in the Wahlstatt cadet house near Liegnitz, the Augusta Viktoria high school in Posen and Schulpforta near Naumburg, Hornung passed the emergency maturity test in the summer of 1918 and joined the news replacement department 3 in Frankfurt an der Oder as a flag junior. Dismissed from army service as a sergeant, he began studying medicine at the University of Halle and passed the preliminary medical examination at the University of Freiburg in the summer of 1921. He passed his medical examination in Leipzig on June 23, 1924, after continuing his medical studies there - and previously for a semester in Munich. His doctorate as Dr. med. he received in 1925 (under Richard Kockel ) at the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Leipzig with a dissertation on " The forensic meaning of clairvoyance and thought transmission ". With this work he tried to refute the parapsychology , which at that time sought to distinguish itself as a science, among other things via criminal telepathy . As a medical officer of the 5th Wuerttemberg Sanitary Department at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Freiburg, he reported in 1935 about a typhus epidemic in the Black Forest caused by the contamination of drinking water with feces and about "Zephyrol, a new disinfectant." The question of disinfectants still preoccupied him in 1939, when he was working as a senior staff doctor at Military District Doctor X, Hamburg. The hygienic investigation center of military district X, whose area covered northern Germany from Emden to Lübeck and from Flensburg to Steinhuder Meer, had determined the blood groups of over 100,000 soldiers by 1940 in order to determine the "relationship between blood groups and racial characteristics". From the Wehrmacht's hygienic investigation center for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , Chief Medical Officer Hornung reported in 1940 on cases of Buday sepsis, in which the pathogen is difficult to detect. His behavior in Prague was later described as “characterized by collegiality” and he was perceived as a “cultivated person”. B. Appreciated Smetana. In January 1945 he summarized reports on the “health care provided by the German Wehrmacht for the civilian population in the occupied territories” (Netherlands, Belgium, France, Balkans, Greece, Italy, Soviet Russia). Here he described almost idyllic conditions, which came about due to the high ethical status of the German doctor, his thirst for research and organizational skills, as well as his willingness "to make his medical skills available to foreigners in the most selfless manner." Vaccinations are everywhere with enthusiastic commitment (Tuberculosis, measles, typhoid, etc.), the supply of hygienically perfect water ensured and medicines such as vaccine serums were generously delivered from the Reich. The "tremendously beneficial" activities of the German medical officer were of "an immeasurable blessing for Europe, indeed for all of humanity." After the end of the Second World War, Hornung became interested in health policy in the USA and presented positions in the United States without comment discussion there about the introduction of social security.

From the winter semester of 1945 Hornung was employed at the University of Marburg as an adjunct professor for public health and for pharmacy and drug law studies. At the same time he was head of the medical department of the regional president in Kassel. In this position he actively took a position on two very controversial topics: the BCG vaccination to protect against tuberculosis and the fluoridation of drinking water for the prophylaxis of dental caries. In July 1960, Hornung took early retirement “for health reasons at the age of 60”. He was married to Margarete (1898–1988), née. Gievers, with whom he had four children.

BCG vaccination in Kurhessen

In 1948, in the administrative district of Kassel (Kurhessen), which had a total of 1,260,000 inhabitants in 18 urban and rural districts, the Danish Red Cross carried out a BCG vaccination of school children to combat tuberculosis . In 1950, Hornung compiled the practical experience gained during the awareness-raising campaigns. According to his report, the vaccination was voluntary and initiated by the medical department of the Hessian Ministry of the Interior. With the participation of a "Danish committee with great experience", public medical officers and pulmonologists were initially informed about the basics in lectures and meetings and "a number of experts were gained" who tried to inform doctors, teachers and finally parents in further meetings. The fact that the participation of the population in the vaccination in the individual districts was very different in the end, Hornung attributed to resistance from "lay circles" and "also from individual doctors", whose arguments against vaccination were "basically mostly the same." In his report, he explained some examples of “the difficulties that had to be struggled with in order to push through the vaccination ” (that is the original wording!). The anti-vaccination campaigners cited the "unproven benefit", as well as the argument that success and compatibility with the undernourished German population could not be expected as with the actions abroad and reference was also made to the Lübeck vaccination accident . After pointing out that, of course, “the nature apostles also reported”, Hornung seems expedient “ to hang this layman's garb lower so that one can learn from these incidents that our health management suffers from the fact that we in Germany far too little for Have done education on health issues. The health education of the people must already take place so intensively in school that such prophets are laughed at by the population from the start . The Americans with their intensive 'Public Health Education' program should serve as a model for this. ”In the course of a year after the vaccination, six of 52,000 vaccinated children were diagnosed with tuberculosis, which, according to Hornung, did not necessarily have anything to do with the vaccination . In this context, objections to the informative value of the tuberculin samples in the preliminary examination are practically "irrelevant, as the vanishingly small number of sick people with 50,000 vaccinated proves."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Who is who? 12th edition of Degeners Who is it? Berlin 1955, 611
  2. ^ H. Hornung: Pharmacy and drug law studies with historical review. Lectures held at the Philipps University of Marburg . Deutscher Apotheker-Verlag, Stuttgart 1955, p. 20.
  3. ↑ H. Hornung: The forensic importance of clairvoyance and thought transmission. Inaugural dissertation, Leipzig 1925; this work was in the archive for criminology 76: No. 4 (Feb. 1925) p. 247.
  4. ↑ Heather Wolffram: Crime, Clairvoyance and the Weimar Police. J. Contemp. History 44: No. 4 (Oct. 2009) 581
  5. ↑ M. Honecker: Course catalog for the summer half year 1935 together with the list of persons and payment of the students for the winter half year 1934/35 . Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 60.
  6. ^ H. Hornung: A drinking water typhus epidemic in the Black Forest . Arch. Hyg. Bakteriol. 113 (1935) 158
  7. ↑ H. Hornung: Zephirol, a new disinfectant . Z. f. Immunity research. 84: No. 2/3 (1935) 119
  8. ↑ H. Hornung: On the disinfectant question . Münch. Med. Wschr. 66: No. 32 (Aug. 1939) p. 1230.
  9. ↑ H. Hornung: About the relationship of blood groups to racial characteristics . Münch. Med. Wschr. 87: No. 5 (1940) 125
  10. ^ H. Hornung: On the knowledge of unclear sepsis cases (Bacillus Buday sepsis) . The Med. World 14 (1940) 1278
  11. ↑ Under the "Personnel files from the administration of the curator of the German academic universities in Prague", which include numerous personnel files of the teaching staff and administrative staff of the German Charles University, there is also a file in the German Federal Archives called "Heinrich Hornung", running in 1944 , R31 / 389 German Federal Archives
  12. ↑ Monika Glettler, Alena Mísková: Prague Professors 1938–1948. Between science and politics. Klartext Verlag, Essen, 2001, p. 595.
  13. ^ H. Hornung: Health care by the German armed forces for the civilian population in the occupied territories. On the basis of reports and files compiled by senior staff doctor lecturer Dr. med. habil. Heinrich Hornung, hygienist at the army doctor. January 1945. Medical academy of the Bundeswehr, specialist information center and virtual library. Munich.
  14. ^ Heinrich Hornung: USA and social security. American arguments in conflict. The public Health Service 11: No. 6 (Sept. 1949) 219
  15. ↑ Prof. Dr. med. Hornung turns 80 today . Hessische Allgemeine, Sat. January 26, 1980 (with picture).
  16. ↑ Small messages . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 14, 1960, p. 4.
  17. ↑ H. Hornung: The BCG vaccination in Kurhessen . Magazine f. Immunity research. 107 (1950) 126
personal data
SURNAME Hornung, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hornung, Heinrich Kurt Felix August Ernst (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German medic
DATE OF BIRTH January 26, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Erndtebrück , North Rhine-Westphalia
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1981
Place of death kassel