Johann Michael Hoffmann (medical doctor)

Johann Michael Hoffmann (* 1741 in Marburg ; † January 13, 1799 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German medic , writer and playwright.

Life

Johann Michael Hoffmann was the son of an executioner in Marburg. He studied first in his hometown, later in Göttingen and Strasbourg and received his doctorate in Strasbourg in 1766 with the dissertation de mercurii sublimati virtute in affectibus internis . In the same year he wanted to be accepted as a doctor in Frankfurt am Main. Because of his origins, however, the established doctors there opposed his request; he received a negative answer on April 8, 1766. His counter-ideas caused a renewed consideration. A legal opinion was also unfavorable for him; but after many correspondence he was finally granted his request on June 3, 1766, with the condition that he should marry a bourgeois daughter or widow. The doctors protested again and appealed to the Reich Court in Vienna . There the matter was decided favorably for him in 1768, and the plaintiffs who wanted to appeal again to the Reich Chamber of Commerce in Wetzlar were rejected.

Hoffmann criticized the supposed healings of the crooked, deaf, lame, mute, hunchbacked and epileptic by the wandering miracle doctor Tisserant from Lorraine and sought the audience about it through his impartial message and assessment ... of the famous Tisserant ... (Frankfurt am Main 1769) and thoughts and To enlighten comments about the cures of Mr. Tisserant (ibid. 1773). In the general weekly weekly paper (ibid. 1787) he brought up particularly such subjects as those related to maintaining physical and mental health. His treatise on bleaching, virgin disease, phlegm fever and watery bloating (3 booklets, ibid. 1788), treatise on the origin and healing of most and most dangerous dropsy (ibid. 1788) and treatise on all pleasant and unpleasant passions of people, and theirs Effects on satisfaction and health (ibid. 1788) are individual sections of that weekly.

Hoffmann showed himself as a fiction writer in the comedy The seduced and improved student , in the tragedy The Confederates and Dissidents (both Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1771), in the strange news from some actors' societies ... (Frankfurt am Main 1771) and in the sensations of the guardian spirit of Germany ... on the unanimous ... election of a coadjutor ... in Mainz (ibid. 1787).

From 1790 Hoffmann was Count Solms-Rödelheim'scher Hofrat and personal physician. He died in Frankfurt in 1799 at the age of 57. His brother Georg Friedrich Hoffmann also practiced as a doctor.

literature

• W. Stricker: Hoffmann, Johann Michael . In: August Hirsch (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon of Outstanding Doctors of All Times and Nations , Vol. 3 (1886), p. 242.
• Hoffmann, Johann Michael . In: Johann Samuelersch , Johann Gottfried Gruber (Ed.): General Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts , 2nd Section, 9th Part (1832), p. 271.