Jakob Robert Steiger

Jakob Robert Steiger (1845)

Jakob Robert Steiger (born June 7, 1801 in Geuensee ; † April 5, 1862 in Lucerne ) was a Swiss doctor and liberal politician.

biography

Steiger was born in Geuensee in 1801 as the son of a small farmer. After studying medicine in Geneva, Freiburg im Breisgau and Paris, he settled in 1826 as a doctor in Büron and later in the city of Lucerne. As a supporter of the regeneration movement , he was elected to the Lucerne Constitutional Council and later to the Grand Council, where he fought for radical, liberal concerns. In 1832 he chaired the Federal Cholera Commission . After the Jesuits were appointed to Lucerne in 1844, he took part in the organization of the First Freischarenzug and was imprisoned for six weeks. For his participation in the Second Freischarenzug (1845) he was imprisoned again and sentenced to death in a sensational trial . The penalty was eventually commuted to galley penalty . With the help of his guards he was able to escape from the boiler tower and was received with cheers in Zurich . Then he settled in Winterthur .

After the fall of the conservative government in 1847, he returned to Lucerne and performed various political functions. He worked as a councilor (1847–1862) and as a governing councilor for the police force (1848–1852). In 1848 he ran in the first parliamentary elections , after which he served as a national councilor until 1852 . In 1848 he ran unsuccessfully as a Federal Councilor .

In addition to his work as a politician and doctor, Steiger also worked as a botanist. A work on the flora of the canton of Lucerne was published shortly before his death.

Works

• The flora of the canton of Lucerne, the Rigi and the Pilatus, along with an introduction to botany in general and explanatory illustrations. Edited for the people and their teachers. Lucerne 1860

literature

• Heidi Bossard-Borner: Steiger, Jakob Robert. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Urs W. Widmer: Jakob Robert Steiger, 1801–1862. Doctor and politician. Zurich 1978
• Alfred Brändli: Jakob Robert Steiger (1801/1862) as a politician and statesman. A contribution to the history of early Swiss liberalism. Lucerne 1953
• Meyer von Knonau :  Steiger, Jakob Robert . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 35, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1893, pp. 580-582.
• Pirmin Meier : Moving life for liberal Switzerland , in Neue Luzerner Zeitung, March 31, 2012 (no free online access)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Swiss Journal of Medicine , Bern 1862, Vol. 1, p. 199
2. ^ Rolf Holenstein: Ulrich Ochsenbein . In: Urs Altermatt (Ed.): Das Bundesratslexikon . NZZ Libro , Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-03810-218-2 , p. 48 .