Johannes Schreyer (City Physician)

Johannes Schreyer (* 1655 ; † 1694 ), also Johann Schreyer, was a city ​​physician (city doctor) in Zeitz , Hamburg and Leipzig in the 17th century. In 1681 he discovered the lung swimming test , also called the Schreyer swimming test ( hydrostatic test , floating test ) after him , a forensic procedure to determine whether a dead newborn was a stillbirth or a child that was still born after birth lived and may have been the victim of infanticide .

Discovery of the swim test

Since the Reichstag in Regensburg in 1532, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina has been in effect in criminal proceedings , according to which surgeons, midwives, etc. were to be heard as experts when the question of whether it was a question of infanticide .

On October 8, 1681, neighbors of the fifteen-year-old unmarried Anna Voigt excavated the body of a newborn child. The body had bloody wounds on the head. Only Anna Voigt came into consideration as the mother and perpetrator of a possible infanticide - the neighbors had noticed an increase and sudden decrease in Anna Voigt's waist size, which is why they went to look for the corpse. Anna was arrested, but denied childicide. She gave birth to the child dead and secretly buried it for fear of shame. The city doctor of Zeitz, Johannes Schreyer, was commissioned by Anna Voigt's father to carry out an expert examination of the body in order to prove the daughter's innocence.

Schreyer was scientifically at the height of his time - which was not necessarily a matter of course for a city physician at the time. Among other things, he had read a book by the Dutch doctor Johann Swammerdam from 1679 about breathing , in which the latter explains that the lungs of a stillborn child sink into water because they have not yet developed, but those of a live-born child are swimming. The ancient doctor Galen had already established that the lungs of live-born children differ from those of still-born children. But it was the discovery of blood circulation by William Harvey in 1628 made it possible to gain further insights into the lungs of newborns, especially the nature of these differences.

Schreyer could relatively easily explain the wounds on the head of the newborn as a result of the search for the corpse. To prove that it was a stillbirth, he used the lung swimming test for the first time on the basis of his knowledge by taking a lung from the newborn and placing it in water. The removed wing sank, from which Schreyer concluded that it had been a stillbirth. After a long process in which Anna Voigt was represented by Christian Thomasius , she was acquitted of infanticide, but had to leave the city for two years because of the secrecy of the pregnancy.

In 1690 Schreyer published the knowledge obtained in the case of Anna Voigt in his book Discussion and Explanation of the Question / Whether there is a certain sign / when a dead child's lungs sink into the water / that such a child died in the womb . Since then, the lung swimming test has been an examination method to determine a stillbirth, in the 17th and 18th centuries it still had to prevail, but has been used since then. As the sole examination method, however, it is now considered too unsafe, so the lungs of a stillborn child can be lighter than water and swim due to decomposition processes or, if the child was killed immediately after birth, it can happen that it has not yet breathed and the Lungs therefore sink.

Further works by Schreyer (selection)

• Scrutinium Medicum Curiosum, De Natura Aqvae Vini & Cerevisiae. Authore Hamburgi (Hamburg): Richter 1690. About the properties of wine and beer .
• New things to the apothecaries: how they should prepare their art scenes according to the basic rules of today's distillery art; With a few comments increased and improved by Messrs. Sylvius, Willis, Blanckart, and others; In addition to an appendix of errors, which are usually used in the preparation of medicaments, of Mr. Anton De Heidens / translated from Dutch into high German by DJS (abbreviation Johannes Schreyers). Second edition. 1690. This book contains a series of chemical investigations which were first published in 1682 by Anton de Heide . [1]

literature

• Peter Becker: On the trail of the perpetrator - A history of criminology. Primus Verlag, Darmstadt 2005, ISBN 3-89678-275-4 .

Web links

• Publications by and about Johannes Schreyer in VD 17 .