János Plesch
János (also Johann, also John) Oscar Plesch (born November 18, 1878 in Budapest , † May 28, 1957 in Beverly Hills , California , USA ) was a Hungarian-German-British internist, pathologist and physiologist .
Life and activity
Education and early career
Plesch came from a Hungarian family of medicine and scholars. His father Ludwig Plesch (1852–1908) was a businessman. The mother Honoria Seligmann (1848-1917) was the daughter of a doctor from Neupest.
Plesch grew up in the household of his uncle in Neu-Pest, who had taken over the medical practice of his grandfather. At the age of four and a half, Plesch attended school with his older brother. After attending school, he began studying medicine at the University of Budapest when he was only sixteen. Although he was already working as an anatomy demonstrator in his third semester , his main interest was physiology and pathophysiology . Study trips took him to Vienna , Berlin and Italy . In 1900 he completed his studies with a doctorate and took an assistant in the then world-famous tuberculosis - sanatorium of Hermann Brehmer in the Silesian Görbersdorf on.
In Görbersdorf, Plesch received thorough training in bacteriology and laboratory technology from Julius Richard Petri , the inventor of the Petri dish . As early as 1901, Plesch went to Strasbourg to see Bernhard Naunyn , one of the leading representatives of experimental clinical medicine. From there he moved to Paris to the physicist Henri Becquerel, with the task of finding out about the new field of radioactivity in the laboratory of the married couple Marie and Pierre Curie . In addition to clinical medicine, Plesch in Strasbourg was particularly interested in pathological anatomy ( Friedrich von Recklinghausen ), pharmacology ( Oswald Schmiedeberg ) and biochemistry ( Franz Hofmeister ).
Career in Germany (1903-1933)
In 1903 Plesch moved to Berlin in order to perfect his further education at the 2nd Medical Clinic of the Charité with Friedrich Kraus and in the laboratory of the animal physiologist Nathaniel Zuntz (1847–1920) at the Agricultural University.
Plesch worked for seven years on a monograph on hemodynamics (1909), which earned him wide recognition and the German license to practice medicine ("scientifically proven achievements"). In 1910 he completed his habilitation as a private lecturer at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin in Berlin. In the same year he received German citizenship. In 1909 he had converted from the Jewish to the Catholic faith. In 1917 Plesch was appointed titular professor for internal medicine (in 1921 he was appointed associate professor).
From 1912 to 1933, Plesch headed the internal department at the Catholic Franziskus Hospital in Berlin. At the same time, he ran a luxury practice in a central location.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Plesch enlisted in the German army, first in Berlin, then as a medical consultant on various fronts.
Plesch took an active part in the cultural, political and scientific life in Berlin in the 1920s. Well-known painters ( Max Liebermann , Max Slevogt , Emil Orlik , Oskar Kokoschka ), theater and film people Alfred Kerr ( Max Reinhardt , Elisabeth Bergner , Marlene Dietrich ), musicians ( Fritz Kreisler , Yehudi Menuhin , Toscanini ), political celebrities ( Emil Rathenau , Wilhelm II. ) And scientists ( Paul Ehrlich , Fritz Haber , Albert Einstein ) belonged to his circle of acquaintances and friends. Einstein (1879–1955) lived and even worked for some time at Plesch's villa Lemm in Gatow . Plesch made numerous trips, in 1913 to South America , 1924 to the USA and 1928 to Eastern Europe and Russia .
Life in Emigration (1933–1957)
After the National Socialists came to power , Plesch, who had had to fight against the prejudice of being an "Eastern Jew" since he settled in Germany - and who had the characteristics attached to this cliché - increased harassment and repression because of his Jewish origin, according to the National Socialist definition exposed. In May 1933 he then went to Great Britain, where he had to take another medical exam and in 1934 acquired the English license before opening a large private practice for heart disease in 1934. At the same time he worked as a pathologist at St. George Hospital in London and at Edward VII Hospital.
With the help of diplomatic circles, Plesch was able to transfer his fortune to Great Britain and settle there in a country castle in Aylesbury . He received British citizenship in 1939.
Even after his emigration, Plesch found himself exposed to (symbolic) harassment from the Nazi regime: In November 1933, his license to teach in Germany was officially revoked. In the spring of 1940 he was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police and placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Security Main Office , a list of people who would be followed by SS special commands in the country in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht should be called in, should be located and arrested with special priority.
In England, Plesch regularly published articles in scientific journals and two monographs on cardiovascular diseases (1937) and arterial hypertension (1947). He also presented his autobiography in 1947 , in which he reported on his relationships with personalities such as Einstein, Oskar Kokoschka , Wilhelm Furtwängler , Alfred Kerr and John Maynard Keynes . This became a great success: it became a bestseller and was translated into several languages.
In 1952 Plesch published a monograph on the work of Rembrandt van Rijn , which significantly expanded the art-historical view of this painter: Plesch put forward the theory that in every real Rembrandt painting through associative-intuitive viewing in the overall picture, secondary, shadow, Accompanying, frame, complex and integrative images (faces, masks, etc.) can be found.
In 1951 Plesch, who was a member of the Finnish Academy of Science (1933) and the Royal Society of Medicine (1934), moved his residence to Switzerland near Montreux .
Medical services
Plesch was extremely versatile as a researcher, Vowinckel and other researchers describe him as original. His preferred field was pathophysiology. As early as nineteen, he proposed a new method of percussion , with the finger bent at right angles in the middle joint. From 1902 he dealt with the biological and pathological effects of radioactivity. He developed a new method of fracture diagnostics (1903), recognized the importance of gas analysis for the experimental physiology (1906), described a Chromo photometer for clinical blood volume determination (1907) and published a monograph on hemodynamic studies (1909). Plesch developed an apparatus for functional hemoglobin determination , the piston wedge hemoglobinometer (1910), used the X-ray method to detect pericardial exudates (1913) and published on the pathogenesis and prevention of caisson disease .
In the years 1922 to 1929 he invented the tonoscillography, the first usable and practical device for clinical blood pressure measurement according to the oscillatory principle, which was developed until it was ready for series production and came onto the market in 1930. Plesch's tonoscillograph provided pressure-volume curves that were noticeable because they were recorded in an arc. Disadvantages of the device were the large moment of inertia of the moving parts, the pulse images distorted by skidding and the only rough detection of the oscillations.
Blood pressure , arteriosclerosis and heart disease remained Plesch's specialty. He recommended climate cures, designed diet therapies and pointed out the connection between arteriosclerosis and hypercholesterolemia .
family
Since 1914, Plesch had been with Melanie Gans (1884–1954), one of five daughters of the industrialist Adolf Gans, one of the three brothers who ran the Cassella color works in Frankfurt . With this he had two sons (Peter Hariolf and Andreas Odilo) and a daughter (Dagmar Honoria). The older son Prof. Dr. Peter H. Plesch is a retired Physical Chemistry Professor at Keele University in Stuffordshire UK and the father of Daniel Plesch, Director of BASIC.
Plesch's sister-in-law, his wife's sister, was Marie Bernhardine Gans, who was married to the manager Milton Seligmann .
Works
- About an improved method of percussion . Münchn Med Wochenschr 49 (1902) 620
- “The Piston Wedge Hemoglobinometer”, a new device for the functional determination of hemoglobin . Münchn Med Wochenschr 58 (1910) 406
- About the clinical method and the results of determining the amount of blood in the living organism . Dtsch Ges Inn Med (Verh.) 24 (1910) 585
- "Graphotonometer", a new self-registering blood pressure device . Dtsch Ges Inn Med (Verh.) 34 (1922) 428
- The heart valve defects including the general diagnosis, symptomatology and therapy of heart diseases , in: Friedrich Kraus , Theodor Brugsch : Special Pathology and Therapy of Inner Diseases. Berlin 1925, vol. 4, p. 1001
- "Tonoszillograph" an apparatus for clinical blood pressure determination . Dtsch Ges Inn Med (Verh.) 41 (1929) 400
- Tonoscillographic blood pressure measurement and the interpretation of the blood pressure curve , in: Emil Abderhalden : Handbook of biological working methods. 1931, Vol. 5 (8), p. 773
- Physiology and Pathology of the Heart and Blood-Vessels . London 1937.
- Blood Pressure and its Disorders , 1944.
- Blood Pressure and Angina pectoris . London 1947
- János, The Story of a Doctor London 1947. (Translation: János. A doctor tells his life Munich 1949)
- Rembrandt in Rembrandt Basel 1952.
literature
- Isidor Fischer : Biographical Lexicon of the Outstanding Doctors of the Last 50 Years , Berlin 1932, Vol. 2, p. 1226.
- J. Kenéz: Janos Plesch (1878-1957). Ther Hung 26 (1978), p. 95.
- Nathan Koren: Jewish Physicians. A Biographical Index Jerusalem 1973, p. 230.
- R. Prigge: "János Plesch", in: Dtsch Med Wochenschr 82 (1957), p. 1019
- Peter Voswinckel: Plesch, Johann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 531 f. ( Digitized version ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Entry on Plesch on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Plesch, János |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Plesch, Johann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hungarian pathologist and physiologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 18, 1878 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Budapest |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 28, 1957 |
| Place of death | Beverly Hills |