Ivar Wickman
Otto Ivar Wickman (born July 10, 1872 in Lund , † April 20, 1914 in Saltsjöbaden ) was a Swedish physician who made important contributions to the study of poliomyelitis (polio).
Life
Education and career
The son of a businessman initially enrolled at Lund University in 1890 , but passed his medical license exams in 1901 at the renowned Karolinska Institute in Solna near Stockholm. In 1905 Wickman published his dissertation in German on poliomyelitis acuta , in 1906 his doctorate was completed. He thus fulfilled the requirements to be able to work as a private lecturer at the Karolinska Institute from now on, and from 1907 to 1909 he also worked as a district doctor in the Östermalm district in Stockholm . As a student of the pediatrician Karl Oskar Medin , whom he admired , he was primarily concerned with research into poliomyelitis . In addition to his dissertation, his study, Contributions to the Knowledge of Heine-Medin's Disease, published in 1907, is considered to be groundbreaking. He also wrote several articles in the field of neurology .
After 1909, Wickman stayed mainly abroad. Among other things, he worked at the Pathological-Anatomical Institute in Helsingfors and conducted psychiatric studies in Paris . In his last years he lived in Wroclaw and Strasbourg , sometimes with great financial problems , where he assisted the co-founder of modern paediatrics, Professor Adalbert Czerny . At the age of 41 he killed himself with a pistol shot in the heart.
Application for the Medin Chair
The reasons for the suicide are unknown as Wickman left no suicide note or other explanations. Colleagues reported that the failed application for the professorship in paediatrics at the Karolinska Institute, which Karl Oskar Medin held until 1914, hit him hard. When the position was advertised in 1912, Wickman figured he had great opportunities to succeed his mentor. However, in December 1913, the Appeals Committee preferred one of its two competitors. On the one hand, the members of the commission reproached him for not having demonstrated breadth in his research; Only half of his total of 22 scientific papers would have dealt with polio . On the other hand, it weighed heavily that Wickman had stayed away from a public teaching practice , an important part of the application process. He had put himself on sick leave with reference to his “insomnia” and only presented a certificate from Professor Czerny, which attested that his assistant had good didactic skills. There are many indications that Wickman shied away from public lectures because, as a stutterer, he suffered from a considerable disruption of his flow of speech.
Research into poliomyelitis
As the successor to Jakob von Heine , Karl Oskar Medin and Adolf von Strümpell , Wickman confirmed the hypothesis , which was still very controversial at the time , that poliomyelitis is transmitted through physical contact with detailed clinical and epidemiological studies . The great Swedish epidemic in 1905 with a total of 1031 registered cases provided him with illustrative material. Using the example of the small parish of Trästena in today's municipality of Töreboda , he showed that people with a large contact area were more easily victims of the disease. In just six weeks, 49 children were newly infected. He first made the observation that the disease spread along the roads and the railway line. After weeks of field studies , Wickman was able to prove that the local public school played an important role in the spread of what he called Heine-Medin's disease .
Wickman wrote many of his articles and books in German, some of which were quickly translated into English. In this work he classified the poliomyelitis as highly infectious. He advised that the so-called "mild cases", i.e. H. Abortive (short-term) and non- paralytic courses of the disease should be taken just as seriously as the serious cases with symptoms of paralysis, as they would make a significant contribution to the spread of the epidemic. He took the view that apparently healthy people can also transmit the pathogen . Wickman first discovered that poliomyelitis was not exclusively, or even primarily, a disease of the central nervous system . Based on his observations, he calculated that an incubation period of three to four days can be assumed.
When the Viennese doctor Karl Landsteiner and his assistant Erwin Popper succeeded in transferring polio-like symptoms to a baboon in 1908 and the microbiologists then began to celebrate them as the discoverers of the poliovirus, this had little impact on Wickman's further work. He himself had predicted the isolation of the pathogen, but never focused on virology in his research .
When naming it ("Heine-Medin disease"), Wickman followed a hint from Sigmund Freud , who considered naming a disease after its discoverer to be more harmless than naming it after symptoms or pathogens. Wickman had recognized that the basic work by Heine on spinal palsy and by Medin on poliomyelitis only covered partial aspects of the disease. However, the term introduced by Wickman in medicine was not to gain acceptance.
Aftermath and posthumous honors
At first, Ivar Wickman's research enjoyed little recognition outside of close specialist circles. Appreciations like that of his colleague Arnold Josefsson were the exception. After Wickman's early and tragic death, he wrote in his obituary :
"Med Ivar Wickman förlorar icke blott vårt land, utan hela den medicinska världen en märkesman."
"With Ivar Wickman, not only our country, but the entire medical world is losing a leading personality."
In the meantime, however, he is one of the pioneers in polio research. The Swedish sculptor Carl Eldh created a wall relief in Stockholm in his honor in 1923. In 1958 a bust of him was unveiled in the Warm Springs , Georgia, USA, built Polio Hall of Fame , in which a total of 15 important polio researchers and two supporters of the scientists are immortalized. The categorization of the different types of poliomyelitis made by Wickman in 1907 is now considered by the European Region of the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the "milestones" in the eradication (elimination of germs) of poliomyelitis.
On the other hand, the polio researcher and author John R. Paul pointed out in 1971:
"Considering the importance of the contributions of Ivar Wickman, I do not believe that his work is fully appreciated today."
"Given the importance of Ivar Wickman's contribution, I am convinced that his work is not sufficiently recognized today."
Fonts
- Studies of acute poliomyelitis. At the same time a contribution to the knowledge of acute myelitis. S. Karger, Berlin 1905 (also dissertation, Stockholm 1905)
- Contributions to the knowledge of Heine-Medin's disease (poliomyelitis acute and related diseases). S. Karger, Berlin 1907.
- Om den sk akuta poliomyelitens uppträdande i Sverige 1905 , Stockholm 1907 (Swedish).
- Acute poliomyelitis or Heine-Medin's disease. With twelve text illustrations and two plates. Springer, Berlin 1911.
- Children's spasmophilia. In: Oswald Bumke u. a. (Ed.): Handbook of Neurology. , Vol. 5: Special Neurology, Part 4 , Springer, Berlin 1914.
literature
- John R. Paul: A History of Poliomyelitis . Yale University Press, New Haven / London 1971 (= Yale studies in the history of science and medicine), pp. 88–97. ISBN 0-300-01324-8 (English)
- Hans. J. Eggers: Milestones in early poliomyelitis research (1840 to 1949). In: Journal of virology. Volume 73, Number 6, June 1999, pp. 4533-4535, ISSN 0022-538X . PMID 10233910 . PMC 112492 (free full text). (Review).
- Per Axelsson: Ivar Wickmans akademiska motgång. Om en tjänstetillsättning och en akademiskt defective. In: Läkartidningen. 100, 2003, H. 3, pp. 140-142. ISSN 0023-7205 (Swedish)
- Per Axelsson: Most mockery. De svenska polioepidemiernas historia 1880–1965 . Carlsson, Stockholm 2004 (= Diss. Umeå 2004), ISBN 91-7203-583-8 (Swedish); with English summary: The Autumn Ghost. The History of Polio Epidemics in Sweden .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Biographical Lexicon of the Outstanding Doctors of the Last Fifty Years , ed. by I. Fischer, 2 vols., Munich / Berlin 1962, vol. 2, pp. 1679 f.
- ↑ See Israel Holmgren, Ivar Wickman. En minnesgärd, in: Allmänna svenska läkartidningen , 11, 1914, pp. 409-416.
- ↑ See Axelsson 2003, pp. 140–142.
- ↑ Svenskahaben och kvinnor , ed. by Nils Bohman, 8 vols., Stockholm 1942–1955, vol. 8, p. 333
- ↑ See MR Smallman-Raynor / AD Cliff, Poliomyelitis - A World Geography. Emergence to Eradication , Oxford 2006, p. 99.
- ↑ See Paul 1971, p. 94.
- ↑ Heine-Medin disease , article on www.whonamedit.com (English)
- ↑ Jakob Heine - ennobled by the king and honored all over the world , publication by Hans Hekler, p. 12f: information on Ivar Wickman; published in: D'Kräz (contributions to the history of the city and area of Schramberg), Schramberg 1990, issue 10, pp. 37–45 ( PDF file; 3.8 MB)
- ^ Arnold Josefsson, Ivar Wickman, in: Hygiea , 76, 1914, pp. 479-484. (Swedish)
- ↑ Milestones in the eradication of poliomyelitis , WHO European Region, document from 2003, see information on 1907 about Dr. Ivar Wickman.
- ↑ Paul 1971, p. 88 (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wickman, Ivar |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wickman, Otto Ivar (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swedish medic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 10, 1872 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lund |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 20, 1914 |
| Place of death | Saltsjöbaden |