Henry Steven Hartmann

Henry Steven Hartmann (* 1826 ; † 1922 in Switzerland ) is a fictional character of the author Jürgen Thorwald , who appears in the books "The Century of Surgeons" and the sequel "The World of Surgeons" as a first-person narrator and most important source. Thorwald claims the books were based on the notes of Hartmann, a US surgeon and the author's maternal grandfather.

Fictional biography

Hartmann is studying medicine at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, specializing in surgery. On January 27, 1845, he was an eyewitness to the first unsuccessful attempt at nitrous oxide anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston under Horace Wells, and on October 16, 1846 he lived in the same auditorium , now known as the Ethereal Dome, where the first successful ether anesthesia under William TG Morton was performed at. As a result of the general enthusiasm for anesthesia, Hartmann decided to witness its triumphal march through the world and first traveled to Europe.

There he visits Robert Liston in London, who on December 21, 1846, a few days after Hartmann's arrival, carried out the first leg amputation under ether anesthesia in Europe. In the same year James Young Simpson , professor of obstetrics in Edinburgh, successfully performed an anesthetic delivery and later advocated for chloroform anesthesia . Hartmann, who speaks German and French in addition to his native English, is now giving up his medical practice and with the financial means of his wealthy father becomes a traveler when it comes to anesthesia progress. He experiences the boundless naivety with which surgeons all over Europe now dare to undertake every conceivable procedure without knowledge of asepsis and cause countless deaths from contact infections such as gangrene , sepsis and puerperal fever .

In 1854, during the Crimean War, Hartmann met the nurse Florence Nightingale , who, on behalf of the British government, led the first strict care for the wounded in the military hospital in Skutari and thus established the organized medical service. During the American Civil War , Hartmann resumes his surgical activity on the side of the Potomac Army and then continues his travels.

Hartmann reports on the pioneering achievements in almost all areas of surgery, operations that were considered impracticable before pain anesthesia was discovered: from stone incisions to plastic surgery to obstetrics and caesarean sections ; from fistula surgery to the early removal of the inflamed appendix to cardiac surgery. He also travels to Africa and India to research the surgical traditions of these continents. In the course of his life, Hartmann encounters almost all the greats who influenced the development of European surgery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from James Young Simpson , the ardent advocate of chloroform anesthesia, to Joseph Lister , the pioneer of asepsis Theodor Billroth , who established the standard in gastric surgery; from Jean Civiale , the first successful technician to remove bladder and kidney stones, to Edoardo Porro (1842–1902), who saved many mothers by using the caesarean section; from Robert Koch , after Louis Pasteur the discoverer of pathogenic germs, to Louis Rehn , who laid the first suture on the open heart.

In 1876 Hartmann lost his five-year-old son Thomas to appendicitis , which at the time was still considered inoperable; his wife Susan died in 1881 of gastric cancer , the operation of which by Theodor Billroth was only just about to break through at the time of her death. Hartmann himself has to endure five operations in a time that already spares him the pain of the operation from the anesthesia, but in which the risk of dying from a wound infection is by no means averted. Thorwald lets Hartmann personally experience and document all the decisive stages in surgical development in a journey of more than fifty years, from the discovery of pain anesthesia to the development of asepsis to open-heart surgery. Hartmann died of a heart attack in Switzerland in 1922.

literature

• Jürgen Thorwald, The Century of Surgeons - Based on the papers of my grandfather HS Hartmann , Steingrüben Verlag, Stuttgart, 1956; 18th edition Knaur, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-426-03275-9
• Wilfried Witte: "Gentlemen, this is no humbug!" Jürgen Thorwald's "grandfather" and the history of the surgeon. In David Oels (ed.): Jürgen Thorwald (Non Fiktion Jg. 6, Heft 1/2 (2011), Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2011 ( ISBN 978-3-86525-249-4 ), p. 71