Heinrich Poll (doctor)

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Heinrich Poll (portrait drawing by Emil Stumpp , 1931)

Heinrich William (Wilhelm) Poll (born August 5, 1877 in Berlin , † June 12, 1939 in Lund ) was a German anatomist .

Live and act

A stumbling block for Heinrich Poll in front of the Eppendorf University Medical Center

Heinrich Poll was born in Berlin, where he attended Friedrich-Gymnasium . From 1895 he studied medicine and during that time mostly dealt with questions of hereditary biology and human genetics . His parents were of Jewish faith; he himself converted to Protestantism in 1899. In his doctorate in 1900, he dealt with changes in the adrenal gland during transplants . From 1899 to 1922 he worked as an assistant to the anatomist Oscar Hertwig at the Anatomical-Biological Institute of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, where he did research and gave lectures. In 1904 he completed his habilitation in the anatomy department. In his first lecture he dealt with the evaluation of anthropological series . During the First World War he worked as a field doctor.

In 1922, Poll received an appointment as associate professor at the Medical Faculty in Berlin. This was the first scheduled extraordinary position for genetics in Germany. In 1924 Poll followed a call from the University of Hamburg as professor of anatomy and head of the anatomical institute. During this time, the professional world changed: while anthropomorphism and anthropology in particular had previously been dealt with, questions about hereditary biology and genetics were now the focus of scientific research. For Poll, the revival of Mendel's rules and work for a new understanding of genetics were of decisive importance. Until 1909 he researched the histology , cytology and evolution of the adrenal gland . In addition to this, he dealt with the reproduction of hybrids with a focus on hybrid birds. Before the First World War, and especially during his time in Hamburg, he did research on twins and tried to diagnose their genetic makeup using fingerprints. To do this, he collected very large amounts of data, which later became known as the “Hamburg twin archive”.

As part of his area of ​​expertise, Poll dealt thematically with concepts that came close to eugenics and underwent radical changes with National Socialist racial hygiene . The anatomist knew that his work had a political meaning and repeatedly made demands on racial hygiene. As an advisory member of the Committee for Racial Hygiene and Population of the Prussian State Health Council, he worked out guidelines for the voluntary sterilization of people with hereditary diseases in 1923. For many years he was a member of the Society for Racial Hygiene and the German Association for Public Conservation .

After the National Socialists came to power , Poll was initially considered a reputable eugenicist . Hereditary biologist Günther Just was one of his academic students . In 1932 he took part in a conference of the Central Institute for Education and Teaching, which dealt with questions of genetic biology and was supposed to prepare working weeks for teachers for the coming years. After Heinz Lohmann, a representative of the German teaching staff , reported him as “non-Aryan”, Poll had to give up the chair. Although he had worked for many years in the Rockefeller Foundation , for which he had co-founded a “Committee for the Promotion of Young Scientists in Medicine” and was in charge of it in the 1920s, he was unable to find a new position abroad. After a period of hardship, specialist colleagues from Sweden finally found him a new position at Lund University in June 1939 . Here, as an emigrant, he died of a heart attack a little later. His wife, the doctor Clara Poll-Cords, only reached Sweden after the death of her husband. She committed suicide on August 5, 1939, the birthday of her husband, suicide .

A stumbling stone in front of the main building of the Hamburg-Eppendorf University Medical Center reminds of Heinrich Poll.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-932-0 (also dissertation Würzburg 1995), p. 156.
  2. ↑ REVETA: Association magazine of the technical assistants in Germany. Berlin, 12th year, 1932, p. 246
personal data
SURNAME Poll, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Poll, Heinrich William; Poll, Heinrich Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anatomist
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1939
Place of death Lund