Hellmut Weese

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Hellmut Weese (born March 18, 1897 in Munich , † January 24, 1954 in Wuppertal ) was a German doctor , pharmacologist and university professor. With the development of Hexobarbitals or Evipans ® , the first short-acting Injektionsnarkotikums , he has the Anesthesiology fundamentally changed.

Life

His parents were the art historian Arthur Weese (1868–1934) and his wife Grete geb. Ranger. In 1905 the family moved to Bern , where the father became a full professor in his subject. In World War I combat soldier, studied Hellmut from 1919 at the University of Bern , Zurich and Munich medicine. In 1924 he married Johanna Barsch , who also studied medicine in Munich. The marriage ended in divorce after five years. After a doctorate to Dr. med. with a thesis "A contribution to the genesis of Karzino sarcomas" he was from 1925 to 1929 assistant Walther Straub at the Munich Institute of Pharmacology, where he in 1928 with a thesis on cardiac glycosides of Pharmacology and Toxicology habilitated . In 1929, while on leave in Munich, he succeeded Fritz Eichholtz as head of the pharmacological laboratories at IG Farbenindustrie AG in Elberfeld . He completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne and became an associate professor there in 1936. During the Second World War he was initially a consulting pharmacologist in the army, but was able to return to Elberfeld in 1940. In 1945 he, who was considered politically unaffected, took over the office of city councilor for Elberfeld. In 1946 he was appointed to the chair of pharmacology at the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf to succeed Ludwig Heilmeyer . He held it until 1950. In 1948 and 1949 he was Vice Rector of the Medical Academy. In the winter semester of 1948/49 he began a series of lectures on clinical anesthesiology. He also carried out research at Bayer AG, which was spun off from IG Farbenindustrie . He helped to re-establish the German Pharmacological Society after the war as deputy chairman and managing director. In September 1948 he hosted its second post-war conference in Düsseldorf. With the surgeon Hans Killian he planned to publish an anesthesia manual, but did not see its completion. He died a few days after he suffered a fractured skull base when falling from a ladder in his Wuppertal-Elberfeld laboratory . His successor at Bayer, Wolfgang Wirth , helped ensure that the manual was published in 1954. His successor at the Düsseldorf chair was Fritz Hahn .

research

Cardiac glycosides

The cardiac glycosides from the red foxglove Digitalis purpurea and other plants were Walther Straub's main area of ​​work. A year before Weese joined his Munich institute, he had summarized his knowledge in the handbook of experimental pharmacology . Solid knowledge about their molecular mode of action and their pharmacokinetics , i.e. their fate in the human and animal organism, was a long way off. Weese dedicated himself to the latter aspect. Four detailed investigations resulted from this, as well as a monograph in 1936 which he dedicated to his teacher Straub. In the first detailed publication, Weese writes: “We are only poorly and often contradictingly informed about the ... fate of the digital bodies in the organs and tissues. This becomes understandable when one considers the difficulty of quantifying the small amounts of glycoside permitted in pharmacological experiments. ”Weese did not overcome this difficulty either. He remained dependent on the pharmacological effects in the intact organism or in isolated organs for the estimation of glycoside quantities. Kurt Repke in particular later developed useful analysis methods . After all, Weese's monograph was widely recognized.

For his digitalis experiments, Weese had to measure the flow velocity of the blood. To this end, he developed a "mechanical, automatically registering current clock for the closed circuit". The “Weese power clock” not only proved itself in his own hands, but also with other researchers.

Methylphenobarbital

At the beginning of his work at Bayer, Weese was possibly still working on the dosage recommendations for the tribromoethanol ( Avertin ® ) for basic anesthesia researched by his predecessor Eichholtz , which he would soon surpass. The first drug for which he himself was pharmacologically responsible was methylphenobarbital , Prominal ® . It served as an anti-epileptic for decades , but has no advantage over the parent compound phenobarbital , which is the only anti-epileptic from the barbiturate series that is still used today (2013).

Hexobarbital

Weese made perhaps his most important discovery while investigating another barbiturate , the hexobarbitals or Evipans ®, synthesized in the IG Farbenindustrie by Walther Kropp (1885–1939) and Ludwig Taub (1877–1956) . In contrast to other barbiturates, the test animals woke up about 30 minutes after a sleep-inducing dose. The authors conclude: “Evipan is a new sleep aid with characteristic properties. It quickly produces a peaceful deep sleep, its effects are short-lived. It is therefore more suitable than any other remedy for insomniacs who cannot fall asleep and for those who wake up early. ... Due to its short duration of action, unpleasant after-effects are not noticeable on the next day. "

Weese wondered whether the substance was also suitable "as an injectable narcotic for short anesthesia". “A suppression of the ethereal intoxication by injection anesthesia lasting 5–15 minutes, which is gentle on the patient's psyche ... should be equally welcome to doctors and patients. “Hexobarbital could be dissolved as the sodium salt, and the pharmacological analysis in animal experiments“ justified the transfer of the preparation to the clinicians. ” Clinical reports followed in the same issue of the German Medical Weekly . The first says that the anesthesia with Evipan sodium deserves "further expansion in every direction ... as intoxication, as basic anesthesia with the addition of ether or ethyl chloride and as general anesthesia that often develops itself". As early as 1933, around 10,000 and in the first ten years after its introduction around 10,000,000 patients were anesthetized with Evipan sodium . Killian's assessment that Weese "became the creator of modern intravenous anesthesia, which literally triumphed across the world" is still valid today.

Evipan itself is obsolete, however. Butalithal or Baytinal ® , which Weese later worked on, was not introduced for patent reasons. Only two barbiturates are now used as intravenous short-term anesthetics, thiopental , which was invented in the USA shortly after hexobarbital in 1935, and methohexital , which was also developed in the USA at the end of the 1950s .

Polyvinyl pyrrolidone

With the onset of World War II, blood loss volume replacement became one of the most pressing medical problems. Pure solutions of inorganic electrolytes were not suitable; the colloid-osmotic pressure of the blood had to be maintained by colloids . Gum arabic contained such colloids. It was used at the suggestion of the British physiologist William Bayliss during World War I, but it had serious side effects. Above all, it remained in the spleen, liver and kidneys for years and damaged these organs. After his exemption from the military in 1940, Weese took on the problem. “His bold idea was to look for something among synthetic high polymers that could functionally represent the plasma proteins for a time, as Bayliss had tried in 1916 with gum arabic. The chemists who previously used such high polymers as adhesives and the like. had developed the like were not easy to win over such an unfamiliar idea; But Weese managed to collect a large number of such substances in a short time and his choice fell very quickly on the polyvinylpyrrolidone synthesized by Reppe . ”Polyvinylpyrrolidone with an average molar mass of 25,000 g / mol was marketed as Periston ® . At the time of the introductory publication in 1943, “the extensive clinical application of the last two years had long since confirmed our animal experiments.” Among other things, after three to four weeks, no more polyvinylpyrrolidone was detectable in the bodies of humans and laboratory animals. That was still the case in 1947, when Weese reported at the first post-war conference of the German Pharmacological Society in Hamburg. By 1950, around a million periston infusions had been administered. The Viennese pharmacologist Franz Theodor von Brücke wrote in his obituary in 1954: "There can be little doubt that thousands of wounded during World War II owe their lives to the periston (polyvinylpyrrolidone) developed by <Weese> ."

But in 1950, thanks to better analysis methods, including research by Weese himself, it was already known that the colloid remained in the body much longer than originally assumed, and how the gum arabic colloids were stored in cells and could damage tissue. It shared the fate of the methylphenobarbitals and hexobarbitals and is no longer used as a plasma substitute in a variety of other applications, including medical applications.

Foundation of the German Society for Anesthesiology

Hexobarbital and polyvinylpyrrolidone brought Weese into close contact with surgeons. He recognized the desirability of special doctors for anesthesiology and became a member of an anesthesia commission convened by the German Pharmacological Society and the German Society for Surgery . At the surgeons' congress in Munich in 1953, the German Society for Anesthesiology, today's German Society for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (DGAI) was founded.

Honors

In 1938 Weese became an honorary member of the International Anesthesia Research Society . In 1942 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina . At the founding event of the German Society for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine in 1953, he was made an honorary member alongside Hans Killian. Since 1978 the DGAI has organized a Hellmut Weese commemorative lecture at every annual conference .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Weese, Arthur on the Dictionary of Art Historians website . Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  2. ↑ Manfred Berger: Women in the history of the kindergarten: Johanna Haarer. In: Martin R. Textor (ed.): Kindergarten pedagogy - online manual . Retrieved November 22, 2013.
  3. ^ Krayer 1998.
  4. ↑ H. Killian, H. Weese (ed.): The narcosis, a teaching and manual. Georg Thieme-Verlag , Stuttgart 1954.
  5. ^ W. Straub: The Digitalis Group. In: Handbook of experimental pharmacology Volume 2, 2nd half. Springer-Verlag , Berlin 1924
  6. ^ H. Weese: Digitalis consumption and digitalis effect in warm-blooded animals. I. Communication: The effective doses of various digitalis glycosides for the heart . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 135, 1928, pp. 228-244. doi : 10.1007 / BF01860118 .
  7. ^ H. Weese: Digitalis consumption and digitalis effect in warm-blooded animals. II. Communication: The extracardiac digitalis consumption and the conditions of glycoside binding on the heart . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 141, 1929, pp. 329-350. doi : 10.1007 / BF02002690 .
  8. ^ H. Weese: Digitalis consumption and digitalis effect in warm-blooded animals. III. Communication: About the origin of the accumulation . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 150, 1930, pp. 14-20. doi : 10.1007 / BF01863855 .
  9. ↑ H. Weese, J. Dieckhoff: On the accumulation of digitalis glycosides . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 176, 1934, pp. 274-282. doi : 10.1007 / BF01930625 .
  10. ↑ Hellmut Weese: Digitalis. Georg Thieme-Verlag, Leipzig 1936.
  11. ↑ N. Rietbrock, BG Woodcock: Pharmacokinetics of digoxin and derivatives. In: K. Greef (Ed.): Cardiac Glycosides. Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology Volume 56 / II. Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1981. ISBN 3-540-10918-8 .
  12. ↑ Kurt Repke, Sorma Klesczewski, Lieselotte Roth: On cleavage and hydroxylation of digitoxin in the rat . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 237, 1959, pp. 34-48. doi : 10.1007 / BF00244558 .
  13. ^ Klaus Starke: A history of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology. In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology 358, 1998; Pp. 1-109, here p. 66. PMID 9721010 . doi: 10.1007 / PL00005229
  14. ^ Krayer 1998.
  15. ^ H. Weese: A mechanical, automatically registering current clock for the closed circuit . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 166, 1932, pp. 392-394. doi : 10.1007 / BF01860682 .
  16. ^ Krayer 1998.
  17. ↑ Goerig and others 1997.
  18. ↑ H. Weese: On the pharmacology of the prominal . In: German Medical Weekly . 58, No. 18, 1932, p. 696. doi : 10.1055 / s-0028-1122959 .
  19. ↑ Goerig and others 1997.
  20. ↑ H. Weese, W. Scharpff: Evipan, a new type of sleep aid . In: German Medical Weekly . 58, No. 31, 1932, pp. 1205-1207. doi : 10.1055 / s-0028-1123566 .
  21. ↑ H. Weese: Pharmacology of the intravenous short anesthetic Evipan sodium . In: German Medical Weekly . 59, No. 2, 1933, pp. 47-48. doi : 10.1055 / s-0028-1131421 .
  22. ^ Wilhelm Baetzner: About a new intravenous anesthesia with Evipan sodium . In: German Medical Weekly . 59, No. 2, 1933, pp. 48-50. doi : 10.1055 / s-0028-1131422 .
  23. ↑ quoted from Goerig and others 1997.
  24. ^ JW Dundee, PDA McIlroy: The history of the barbiturates . In: Anesthesia . 37, 1982, pp. 726-734. doi : 10.1111 / j.1365-2044.1982.tb01310.x .
  25. ^ Krayer 1998.
  26. ↑ H. Weese, FH Koss: About a new ultra-short anesthetic . In: German Medical Weekly . 79, No. 16, 1954, pp. 601-604. doi : 10.1055 / s-0028-1115490 .
  27. ^ Krayer 1998.
  28. ^ DL Tabern, EH Volwiler: Sulfur-containing barbiturate hypnotics . In: Journal of the American Chemical Society . 57, No. 10, 1935, pp. 1961-1963. doi : 10.1021 / ja01313a062 .
  29. ↑ K. Engelhard, C. Werner: Anesthesia - Inhalation and injection anesthetics. In: K. Aktories, U. Förstermann, F. Hofmann and K. Starke (eds.): General and special pharmacology and toxicology. 11th edition, Munich, Elsevier GmbH 2013, pages 241-260. ISBN 978-3-437-42523-3
  30. ^ Hecht and Schulemann 1954.
  31. ↑ G. Hecht, H. Weese: Periston, a new blood fluid substitute . In: Munich Medical Weekly . 90, 1943, pp. 11-15.
  32. ↑ H. Weese: blood substitute problems . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology . 208, 1949, pp. 5-6. doi : 10.1007 / BF00247976 .
  33. ↑ H. Weese: Indifferent Colloids in Surgery and Internal Medicine . In: German Medical Weekly . 76, No. 23, 1951, pp. 757-761. doi : 10.1055 / s-0028-1116792 .
  34. ↑ quoted from Krayer 1998.
  35. ^ H. Hüsselmann: Storage phenomena in humans after periston . In: Clinical weekly . 30, 1952, pp. 801-808. doi : 10.1007 / BF01471464 .
  36. ↑ W. Mohr, R. Endres-Klein: Do polyvinylpyrrolidone deposits still occur in internal organs around the turn of the millennium? . In: The Pathologist . 23, 2002, pp. 386-388. doi : 10.1007 / s00292-002-0527-3 . PMID 12376866 .
  37. ↑ Frank Fischer, Stephan Bauer: A jack-of-all-trades in chemistry - polyvinylpyrrolidone . In: Chemistry in Our Time . 43, No. 6, 2009, pp. 376-383. doi : 10.1002 / ciuz.200900492 .
  38. ↑ U. Förstermann: Plasma substitutes - therapy of peripheral circulatory failure. In: K. Aktories, U. Förstermann, F. Hofmann and K. Starke (eds.): General and special pharmacology and toxicology. 11th edition, Munich, Elsevier GmbH 2013, pages 475-480. ISBN 978-3-437-42523-3
  39. ↑ Goerig and others 1997.
  40. ↑ The Hellmut Weese memory lecture on the DGAI website. ( Memento of the original from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved November 27, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dgai.de

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Weese, Hellmut
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weese, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German pharmacologist, doctor and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1954
Place of death Wuppertal