Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht

Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht (born May 11, 1752 in Stade , † March 11, 1814 in Altona / Elbe ) was a German doctor and writer .

Life

Albrecht was the son of the doctor and councilor Günther Anton Heinrich Albrecht and his wife Katharina Dorothea Kolbe. After attending school in his hometown, Albrecht switched to the monastery school in Ilfeld . In 1769, enrolled him at Erfurt University to study medicine, among others, Professor Johann Wilhelm Baumer , where he also lived. There he met his daughter and fell in love with her.

Baumer died in 1771, and after the obligatory year of mourning Albrecht married his then 14-year-old daughter Sophie . With her he had a daughter and a son. In 1772 Albrecht was able to successfully complete his studies with a doctorate and immediately got a job as a private lecturer at the same medical faculty . Until 1776 he held lectures, mostly on obstetrics, venereal diseases and the history of medicine. The only publication from Albrecht's time as a lecturer deals with " Zootomic and physical discoveries of the internal structure of bees, especially the type of mating " (1775).

In 1776 Albrecht made his debut as a theater writer with the play " The unnatural father ". In the same year he and his wife went to Reval with Count Manteuffel . The count had hired him as a personal physician on his estates in Estonia . Albrecht held this position until 1780; only interrupted by several extended trips through Estonia and Russia . In the course of 1780 the Albrecht couple returned to Germany and settled in Erfurt.

There Albrecht began to establish himself as a writer; his wife joined the impresario Pasquale Bondini and his theater company. From 1782 Albrecht accompanied his wife to performances in Leipzig , Dresden , Frankfurt am Main and Prague , where in 1793 he became the owner of a bookshop. On these tours the Albrechts made friends with Friedrich Schiller in Frankfurt / Main . These friendships were strengthened through visits and so it was that Schiller ended his Don Carlos in the Albrechts house . During this time Albrecht translated the philosophical work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into German.

From the beginning Albrecht was enthusiastic about the ideas of the French Revolution and over time he became one of the most important leaders of the democrats of northern Germany who wanted to continue the revolution in Germany. In his revolutionary writings Albrecht spoke out against slavery (" Liberation "), was enthusiastic about the American War of Independence (" The English in America ") and praised the struggle of the Holsteiners against the Swedes (" Altona a hundred years ago ").

Because of the censorship , Albrecht published almost all of his novels as clefs . However, since these were mostly looked through, he often also published them anonymously and with fake print locations. From the multitude of his literary works, Lauretta Pisana is perhaps to be emphasized; it is considered to be one of the first erotic novels in modern Germany.

In 1795, Albrecht and his wife settled near Hamburg , but a short time later they moved to Altona together , as the political situation there in the Kingdom of Denmark was much more liberal. On September 1, 1796, Albrecht founded the National Theater in Altona and in the same year began to publish his political magazine Der Totenrichter . In Altona he became a member of the Masonic Lodge Carl zum Felsen .

In 1798 the Albrecht couple divorced by mutual agreement. When Sophie's second husband, a colleague from the theater, died a short time later, Albrecht married his divorced wife a second time. From around 1804 Albrecht turned back to medical work and practiced in Hamburg. In addition to his practice, he had great success with his writings on sexual hygiene.

In 1813 he gave up his practice as a doctor and took a position as senior physician in a military hospital. During a typhoid epidemic, he became infected in a patient and died at the age of 62 on March 19, 1814 in Altona.

Works

Albrecht's literary work can be divided into two phases: From 1776 onwards he wrote over 80 novels and plays, the majority of which were entertaining and in the second half of the 19th century were classified as knight, robber and horror romance .

The second focus of his work is mostly political writings and finally a large number of "medical" publications.

Some of his popular science works enjoyed great popularity throughout the 19th century and were reprinted repeatedly. Some were true health Bibles well into the 20th century and have been revised by other authors. In 1909, for example, the 38th edition of the book “Man and his gender, medical instructions on the sex life of man” appeared in his name. Despite the wide range of topics, which in addition to ophthalmology also include internal and infectious diseases , surgery , ENT , pediatrics , dermatology and dentistry , Albrecht's particular commitment to educating the public about gynecological, venereal and sexual topics is unmistakable. From 1808 he began to publish numerous publications on popular medicine.

Fiction

• The unnatural father . Tragedy (1776)
• The Monkey Kings or The Reformation of the Monkey Country (1789)
• Lauretta Pisana. The life of an Italian fanatic (1789)
• Urany. Queen of Sardinia in the planet Sirius (1790)
• Pansalvin, Prince of Darkness and his mistress (1794)
• Saul the Two, called the Fat, King of Cannon Land (1798)
• Miranda, Queen of the North, mistress of Pansalvin (1798)
• Kakodaemon the Terrible (1800)
• Dolko the Bandit, contemporary of Rinaldo Rinaldini (1801)
• The five skulls (1810)

Political writings and plays with political content

• Conversations regarding bricklaying. With an appendix of Rosicrucians. (1785)
• Dreyerley Effects, a Story from the Planetary World (1789)
• The English in America. A play in four acts (1790), Wehrhahn, Laatzen 1998, ISBN 3-932324-13-7 .
• The colony. Drama (1792)
• Liberation . Drama (1798)
• Altona a hundred years ago . Drama (1804)

Medical writings

• Sensible Health Care (1808)
• The pediatrician (1808)
• Surgical counselor (1808)
• The ophthalmologist (1809)
• The secrets of women (1809)
• Help for all who suffer from hypochondriac or hysterical evils (1809)
• General auxiliary book for the female gender (1809)
• The headache (1809)
• The diseases of hearing (1809)
• The cowpox or vaccination (1809)
• Safe remedies for toothache or the little dentist (1809)
• On the disease and healing method of pollutions of both sexes (1809)
• The female bosom and means of enhancing its beauty and keeping it healthy (1810)
• Sexual intercourse together with a reasonable instruction on how to behave (1810)
• Complete fever book for all fever sufferers (1810)
• Wundarzney Art's Domestic Handbook (1810)
• Dietary manual for merchants (1810)
• Safe help for all those who suffer from golden veins or hemorrhoids (1810)
• Reliable Help for Consumers (1810)
• Help book for all who suffer from weakness of the genital organs (1810)
• General auxiliary book for the male sex (1810)
• Cough, catarrh and runny nose (1810)
• The diseases of the skin called rashes (1810)
• General and complete textbook for the cure of all venereal diseases, the art of recognizing and treating them, and in an emergency, if one is without a doctor, to rid oneself of them (1810)
• Rathgeber for rheumatic pain or so-called rivers (1810)
• Rathgeber for pregnant women, giving birth and women who have recently given birth (1810)
• The worm diseases (1810)
• The Rathgeber in cramps, especially in stomach cramps (1811)
• Practical counselor against gout (1811)
• The dysentery, its knowledge and certain remedies (1811)
• The mucous diseases (1811)
• The monthly cleansing of the second sex (1812)
• Popular teaching in obstetrics (1812)

literature

• Rüdiger Schütt (Ed.): Adored, cursed, forgotten. Life and work of Sophie Albrecht and Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht. Wehrhahn, Hannover 2015, ISBN 978-3-86525-447-4 .
• Holger Dainat: "Vengeance never sleeps!" About the robber novels by Albrecht and Arnold. In: Dirk Sangmeister, Martin Mulsow (ed.): Subversive literature. Erfurt authors and publishers in the age of the French Revolution (1780–1806). Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, pp. 454–478.
• From reading flowers and secret societies. The years of Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht as a publisher in Reval and Erfurt. In: Heinrich Bosse, Otto-Heinrich-Elias, Thomas Taterka (eds.): The Baltic literatures of the Goethe time. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2010, pp. 413–489.
• Bernhard Lang: Hebrew Freemason - Albrecht. In: Bernhard Lang: Joseph in Egypt: A Cultural Icon from Grotius to Goethe. Yale University Press, New Haven 2009, 228-246.
• Hans-Werner Engels : Albrecht, Johann Friedrich Ernst . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 1 . Christians, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7672-1364-8 , pp. 19-20 .
• Michael Thiel: Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht (1752–1814): doctor, medical writer, political fiction writer. Institute for the History of Medicine, 1970.
• Walter Grab : Albrecht, Johann Friedrich Ernst. In: Karl Obermann , Heinrich Scheel , Helmuth Stoecker u. a. (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for German History. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1967, p. 15 f.
• Walter Kunze:  Albrecht, Johann Friedrich Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 181 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Karl Goedeke :  Albrecht, Joh. Fr. Ernst . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 321 f.
• Detlev L. Lübker, Hans Schröder : Lexicon of Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburg and Eutinian writers from 1796 to 1828. 1. Dept. A – M, Verlag K. Aue, Altona, 1829, p. 9, no. 20 ( online )

Web links

Wikisource: Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht  - Sources and full texts

• Works by and about Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht  in the German Digital Library
• Works by and about Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht at Open Library
• Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht in the Internet Archive