Jacob Churg

Jacob Churg (born July 16, 1910 in Dolginow , Russian Empire , today Dauhinawa , Wilejka Rajon , Belarus ; † July 27, 2005 in New York City ) was an American pathologist .

family

Churg grew up as the son of a Jewish medical family in Vilnius . The father Wolf Rawitsch was a doctor, the mother Gita, worked as a dentist. In 1942 he married Vivian Gelb, and in 1943 he acquired American citizenship.

His son Andrew Churg, professor of pathology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada), later dealt with similar topics as his father. Churg's second son Warren Churg is a practicing internist .

education and profession

In Vilnius (then: Wilna ) Churg attended local schools and the university. He completed his medical studies here in 1933 and then worked until 1934 as an assistant in the internal medicine department of the Vilnius City Hospital and the Vilejka State Hospital . There Churg concentrated on experimental work as an assistant in pathology at the University of Wilno. With the scientific graduation in pathology (Dr. med. Sc.) And the increasing political uncertainty and the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, he left his Polish homeland and went to New York City in 1936 , where his uncle Louis Chargin was a well-known dermatologist and chief physician in the Dermatology Department of Mount Sinai Hospital . Here he found a job as an assistant in the bacteriological laboratory.

After military service in World War II , Churg continued his research and, as a pathologist, devoted himself to researching pathological vascular changes together with Lotte Strauss .

Since 1966 Churg held a full chair in pathology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and worked as a consultative pathologist for several hospitals in New York and New Jersey . Churg was a consulting pathologist for many international study groups on glomerular diseases.

After his retirement, Jacob Churg continued to be co-editor of the journals Nephron , Laboratory Investigation , Histopathology , Ultrastructural Pathology and Contributions to Nephrology and recognized worldwide as a nephrological and pathological expert.

power

The earliest studies and publications by Churg after his arrival in the USA in the late 1930s and early 1940s dealt with the toxicity of sulfonamides for the liver and kidneys in animal experiments. From 1942 he was able to work exclusively in his specialty, pathology.

In 1950, Churg began investigating kidney pathology, the general topic of his future scientific research. In 1950 he introduced the kidney biopsy as a standard diagnostic examination and thus initiated the systematic study of glomerular diseases. Since histological knowledge of the kidney corpuscle was limited by its complex structures, which were difficult to visualize with the usual cutting and staining techniques, Churg developed a thin-section technique and, together with Prado, in 1956, the chromotropic aniline blue staining . Churg's ability to apply new techniques in the pathological specialty area was also shown in the increased use of electron microscopy .

Together with Lotte Strauss , he described allergic granulomatosis ( Churg-Strauss syndrome ) in 1951 .

Churg performed more than 5000 renal biopsies. The analyzes of these tissue samples, which were examined in his laboratory, appeared in many publications on different forms of glomerular diseases: focal glomerulosclerosis , membranous glomerulonephritis , congenital nephritis , diabetes mellitus , amyloidosis and nephritis in systemic lupus erythematosus .

Churg's most important publications include more than 300 journal articles, ten books, 40 book articles (including kidney pathology, hypertension ) and a number of excellent atlases on renal pathology. In addition, Churg had a decisive influence on the development of the WHO histological classification of kidney diseases. In addition to his research on kidney pathology, he also studied asbestosis , and numerous papers on the pathology of mesothelioma and other malignant neoplasms have appeared .

Works

• Influence of Gonadotropic Hormone upon Complement in Rabbit's Blood . Diss. Med. 1936
• Allergic Granulomatosis, Allergic Angiitis, and Periarteritis nodosa (with L. Strauss). In: Am J Pathol , 27 (1951) 277
• Structural Basis of Renal Disease . 1968
• Nephrology . 1979

literature

• Eberhard J. Wormer : Angiology - Phlebology. Syndromes and their creators. Munich 1991, pp. 23-30, VI-VII
• E. Grishman, T. Faraggiana, VS Venkataseshan: The Jacob Churg Festschrift. Introduction. In: Am J Kidney Dis . 10 (1987) 155
• JAA Hunter, Karl Holubar: Dr. Jacob Churg. Am J Dermatopathol 8 (1986) 358
• American Men and Women in Science 2 (1986) 230
• Who's Who in America. 42nd ed. 1 (1982-1983) 583

Web links

• Biography whonamedit engl.
• Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: Short biography of Jacob Churg with picture engl.