Josef Starzengruber

Josef Starzengruber (born January 31, 1806 in Gallspach ; † January 7, 1877 in Andorf ) was a physician and is considered the actual founder of the spa town of Bad Hall .

His youth

Starzengruber was born as the son of the innkeeper couple Matthias and Anna Maria Starzengruber in Gallspach . After the early death of his mother (1806), he became an orphan at the age of nine. After attending elementary school, he was apprenticed to a related blacksmith and from 1822 was able to attend grammar school in Linz .

Education

After graduating from secondary school, Starzengruber can be found as a medical student at the University of Vienna from 1829 . During his studies he was deployed in the Radetzky's army in northern Italy to fight cholera . In 1836 he received his doctorate on the subject of Syllabus quarundam plantarum medicatarum ("Directory of certain medicinal plants"). In the same year he settled in (Bad) Hall as a doctor, where he lived in house no. 126 (today Steyrerstraße 5).

Bath doctor in Hall

As a student in Hall he had already got to know the modest and rather uncontrolled bathing industry. In 1837 he obtained the first bathing regulations from the state government and was the first bath doctor to always endeavor to promote the spa business. This included the improvement of the accommodation options, the creation of walking paths and the installation of benches. But the expansion of the silted iodine source shaft was also on his initiative. With the financial support of a Viennese businesswoman whose stepdaughter had found healing in Hall, he built a temple-like fountain house above the Tassilo spring in 1841. From 1842 printed bathing lists appeared and in 1845 he suggested the rebuilding of the source shaft.

In 1843 he published his much-acclaimed work Die Iod-, Brom- und Lithionhaltige Salzquelle zu Hall next Steyr in Austria above the Enns . Despite petty envy and resistance, the success of his measures could not be stopped and the reputation of Hall's healing spring penetrated all crown lands of the monarchy. In his house, Starzengruber regularly accommodated distinguished guests in some of the rooms. Again and again, however, he also took in poor sick people and demonstrated the effectiveness of the healing spring on them.

It was not until the revolutionary year of 1848 that Hall's expansion plans suffered a serious setback and all efforts appeared in vain. In particular, the construction of a central bathhouse seemed a long way off.

Frustrated, he left Hall in 1850 - too early, as it turned out later. A few years later, the Upper Austrian provincial estates took over the mineral spring and had the bathing house suggested by Starzengruber built, so that the iodine bath Hall was founded in 1855.

Further activity

In Taufkirchen an der Pram and Andorf near Schärding he found a new field of activity as a general practitioner and gynecologist from 1851, but remained connected to his previous place of work and wrote articles in German-language newspapers about the healing effects of the Bad Hall springs. At his new place of work he was also politically active after he had already refused a posting to the Kremsier Reichstag in 1848 .

From 1864 to 1867 he acted as a member of the Andorf parish council and, together with Pastor Andreas Studener, earned great merits for the subsequent construction of a railway station in Andorf in 1868, the construction of which was short-sightedly rejected when the railway opened in 1861.

In 1872, Dr. Starzengruber retires. He died of a heart condition in Andorf on January 7, 1877.

literature

• Constantin von Wurzbach : Starzengruber, Joseph . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 37th part. Imperial-Royal Court and State Printing Office, Vienna 1878, p. 231 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ferdinand Krackowitzer & Franz Berger: Biographical Lexicon of the State of Austria above the Enns. Scholars, writers and artists in Upper Austria since 1800. Passau / Linz 1931, pp. 317–318.
• Annemarie Schmölzer: Bad Hall's trailblazer. Dr. Josef Starzengruber, Bad Hall's first spa doctor. In: Bad Haller Kurier. 11/12, 1955, pp. 6-7.
• Edmund Guggenberger (Hrsg.): Upper Austrian Medical Chronicle. Linz 1962, p. 334.
• Rieder Volkszeitung: Radetzky's cholera doctor in the army. Volume 82, 1972, No. 2.
• Rieder Volkszeitung: Andorf's first doctor of medicine. Volume 87, 1977, No. 1.
• Malvine Stenzel: Health resorts and tourism using the example of three Upper Austrian municipalities. In: Upper Austrian homeland sheets . Year 41, Linz 1987, Issue 3, pp. 236–261 (concerns Bad Hall, Bad Kreuzen and Bad Zell), online (PDF; 3.6 MB) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at.
• Katharina Ulbrich: Old houses tell. Chronicle, pictures and stories of the houses of the spa and the old Bad Hall. Self published in 2005.
• Wolfgang Perr: Dr. Josef Starzengruber, a "forgotten" Gallspacher. In: Gallspacher community newspaper. No. 1/2007.
• D. Angetter:  Starzengruber Josef. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 13, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2007–2010, ISBN 978-3-7001-6963-5 , p. 112.