Helmut Wolff (surgeon)

Helmut Wolff (2013)

Helmut Wolff (born October 8, 1928 in Marinkow, Volhynia , Ukrainian SSR ; † October 24, 2017 in Berlin-Marzahn ) was a German surgeon. As a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, he was the leading surgeon in the German Democratic Republic . In 1977 he succeeded in the third liver transplant in Germany in Dresden, in 1986 at the Charité the first successful heart transplant and the first combined kidney and pancreas transplant in the GDR.

Life

Wolff came from a peasant family who moved to East Prussia and then to the so-called " Wartheland " after the Hitler-Stalin Pact in October 1939 . From 1936 to 1943 he attended elementary school in Marinkow and the central school in " Warthbrücken ". When Germans flew and expelled from Central and Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1950, when he came to Cainsdorf in Saxony , the 17-year-old Wolff attended the preparatory college in Zwickau . Originally , he wanted to become a farmer and later a pharmacologist , but two weeks after starting his studies, on the advice of friends, he devoted himself to studying medicine. Wolff was a member of the Antifa Youth and the Free German Youth . Even before his studies, he joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in 1948 . From 1950 he studied at the University of Leipzig . After passing the state examination with “very good”, he completed the compulsory assistantship at the Leipzig University Hospital in 1956/57 . In the Promotion A at of the reorganized Karl Marx University , he was on 18 April 1956 to the Dr. med. PhD. He then spent a year in Physiological Chemistry with Erich Strack . He then went through surgical training from 1959 to 1963 with Herbert Uebermuth , where he worked for PhD B and on July 1, 1964 Dr. med. habil. has been. Appointed senior physician and lecturer , he began experimenting with liver transplants.

Dresden

In 1972 he became professor and clinic director of the surgical clinic of the Medical Academy Carl Gustav Carus Dresden . There he devoted himself to general , thoracic and vascular surgery . The focus was on liver and pancreatic surgery , oncology and thymus surgery . In 1977 he achieved the first clinical liver transplant in the GDR and the Eastern Bloc . In 1978 he received the GDR National Prize for his scientific work in this area .

East Berlin

In 1978, the Humboldt University of Berlin appointed Wolff as professor and director of the Charité Surgical Center . His wife Dr. Karin Wolff, an anesthesiologist , returned to the GDR from West Germany . The focus of his work was liver and pancreatic surgery, the transplantation of liver, pancreas and islets of Langerhans , oncology and experimental organ transplants. Because of his achievements in transplant surgery , Wolff was one of the leading surgeons in Germany. He became known to the general public through Erich Honecker's operation . Wolff was deputy chairman of the council for medical science at the minister for health of the GDR and headed the main research area organ transplantation. Under his and Moritz Mebel's leadership, the Center for Transplant Surgery was established at the Charité. After many years of preparation, a team led by Wolff carried out the GDR's first heart transplant on June 30, 1986 at the Charité. From 1981 to 1984 and from 1986 Wolff headed the East Berlin section of the Berlin Surgical Society . In 1988, Wolff was commissioned by the Ministry of Health of the GDR to assess the level of research in the clinical disciplines in the GDR and to draw conclusions from it.

turn

With his West Berlin colleague Ulf Stockmann, Wolff ensured the reunification of the Berlin Surgical Society immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall . It was carried out on January 15, 1990 - ten months before German reunification . After the reunification and peaceful revolution in the GDR he was accused of having worked as IM Becher for the Ministry for State Security . In a letter to Senator Manfred Erhardt on October 20, 1992, Wolff stated that he had never signed a declaration of commitment and had never been an IM. With the approval of his trips to western countries , he was obliged to report to the Vice-Rectorate , and he never “assessed scientists from western countries”. In order to enable his own employees to travel to the West and make the clinic internationally known, as clinic director he had to submit the relevant travel application and - even against his better judgment - justify the person's loyalty to the state. Discussions with the management department, senior departments and representatives of the Ministry of Health and Higher Education preceded the decision in the Ministry of State Security. Because of the assumption of an escape from the GDR , it was mostly negative. Wolff settled in agreement with the University President Marlis Dürkop 31 December 1992 - ten months before the usual retirement age - for health reasons emeritus .

Others

Since 1995 he has hosted the annual conference for chief surgeons in Teupitz . The results of the Teupitz talks are published in anthologies. Since 2000 he was chairman of the scientific advisory board of the KMG clinics .

Wolff suffered a stroke on June 30, 2017 and died after just under four months in the Berlin Accident Hospital . The funeral service took place on November 8th in the village church of Biesdorf . Klaus Gellert paid tribute to the scientific life work of his teacher Wolff.

Works

Wolff lists 364 publications and 415 lectures. At the 52nd Austrian Surgeons' Congress in Vienna (June 23-25, 2011) he reported in detail on surgery in the GDR.

editor

• Liver, biliary and pancreatic surgery . Berlin 1978.
• with Richard Reding and Siegfried Kiene : Basics of surgery . Leipzig 1984.
• Surgery 100 years ago . Berlin 1986.
• Scientific symposium with international participation on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Berlin Surgical Society and the 150th birthday of Ernst v. Miner. Publishing house health . Berlin 1992. ISBN 3-333-00695-2 .
• Conference reports on the Teupitz Talks 1997–2011 . Heidelberg.

Book contributions

• M. Herbst (Ed.): Current questions in surgery. Leipzig 1966.
• Albrecht Gläser (Ed.): Contributions to clinical cancer research. University of Leipzig 1967.
• Jörg Rüdiger Siewert , Harder (Ed.): Surgical gastroenterology. Springer 1981/1985.
• Federlin, Bretzel, Thieme (eds.): Islet Isolation, Culture and Cryopreservation. 1981.
• Gert Carstensen (ed.): Surgery through the ages. Springer 1983.
• Franz Paul Gall , O. Gebhardt, Heinrich Groitl, Ludwig Zukschwerdt (eds.): Advances in pancreatic surgery. 1987.
• Hans Joachim Serfling , Karl-Ludwig Schober , Walter Schmitt (Hrsg.): Special surgery. Leipzig 1990.
• Wolfgang Hepp (Ed.): Operative vascular access. Steinkopf, 1995.
• Ferdinand Köckerling , Hans Werner Waclawiczek (Hrsg.): Liver surgery. Leipzig 1999.
• Ferdinand Köckerling, Hans Lippert , Ingo Gastinger (eds.): Advances in colorectal surgery. Scien Med, 2002.

Honors

• National Prize of the GDR (1978)
• Honorary member of the Czechoslovak Surgical Society (1981)
• Honorary member of the Hungarian Surgical Society (1982)
• Foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences (1982)
• Honorary Member of the Greek Surgical Society (1985)
• Honorary Member of the Cuban Surgical Society (1985)
• Dr. hc from the University of Granada (1986)
• Honorary member of the Pediatric Surgical Society of the GDR (1989)
• Honorary member of the Thuringian Surgical Society (1998)
• Honorary member of the Saxon Surgical Society (2000)
• Anniversary award of the German Society for Surgery for the surgical life's work (2002)
• Honorary member of the Berlin Surgical Society (2013)

literature

• Klaus Gellert: In memoriam Prof. Dr. med. Dr. med. hc Helmut Wolff . Chirurgische Allgemeine 19th volume, 1st issue (2018), pp. 16-18.

Web links

• Literature by and about Helmut Wolff in the catalog of the German National Library

Remarks

1. ↑ The heart transplant patient is still alive (2013)
2. ↑ based on a unanimous decision of 2012

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine from October 28, 2017
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hans Lippert: Helmut Wolff, Prof. Dr. med, Dr med hc, emeritus chair and professor of Surgery, Charité, Humboldt University Berlin.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   (English)
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} communication from H. Wolff (2012)
4. ↑ Topic of the thesis: Animal experiments with 2,3-dimercapto-propionic acid and 2,3-dimercaptopropanol (BAL)
5. ↑ Topic of the work: Enzyme activities in the callus, in the bones and in the muscles during fracture healing
6. ↑ Doctors at the Stasi: Dispute over honor for GDR surgeons. In: Der Tagesspiegel. Berlin.
7. ↑ Detlev Ganten, Karl Max Einhäupl, Jakob Hein (ed.): 300 years of Charité - as reflected in their institutes. P. 194
8. ^ Bundesarchiv - Picture database: Simple search. Retrieved September 26, 2017 . 
9. ^ Kaden publishing house
10. ↑ Obituary notice of the widow Dr. Karin Wolff on behalf of all relatives and friends
11. ^ H. Wolff: On the development of surgery and surgical research in the GDR . German Society for Surgery - Announcements 1/2012, pp. 1–8
12. ↑ Foreign Members. (No longer available online.) Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, archived from the original on July 20, 2011 ; accessed on May 8, 2016 . 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.  
13. ^ Communication from the Berlin Surgical Society