Joseph Heine

Joseph (von) Heine (born November 28, 1803 in Würzburg , † November 4, 1877 in Munich ) was a physician and government and medical councilor in the Palatinate.

From Würzburg to the Palatinate Province (1803–1848)

Joseph Heine was born on November 28, 1803 as the son of the orthopedic mechanic Johann Georg Heine in Würzburg. He attended grammar school in Würzburg until 1824 and then studied medicine in Würzburg and Munich . In 1827 he passed the state examination in Bamberg and received his doctorate in medicine in Würzburg in the same year.

Heine deepened his medical knowledge through trips abroad. In the winter of 1828/29 he dealt with skin diseases and surgery in Paris , the latter with Guillaume Dupuytren .

The departure of his father Johann Georg Heine to Holland in 1829 forced Joseph to return to Würzburg, where he and his cousin Bernhard headed the Karolinen Institute for a year . In 1830 the "desire for further training" drove him to Vienna and Warsaw (1831), where he treated the wounded of the Polish November uprising and those suffering from cholera.

Even suffering from typhus, he had to return to Bavaria and practiced as a doctor in Homburg am Main and in Würzburg, before he applied as a canton doctor in Waldmohr in the Palatinate region and became a royal Bavarian civil servant when he was appointed in 1836, which he remained until his death. In 1840 he applied for a higher position, he became a canton doctor 1st class in Germersheim (until 1851)

"Political" interlude (1848-1851)

In the revolutionary year of 1848, Joseph Heine applied for a seat in the Frankfurt National Assembly , but narrowly failed. The political attitude of the "apolitical", as he called himself, can be described as "Greater German, anti-revolutionary". His second attempt at a political mandate was successful: He was elected to the second chamber of the Bavarian state parliament. He gave the mandate back in 1851 and went to Bamberg as a city court doctor and hospital director.

District and Medical Council of the Palatinate (1856–1875)

Another leap in his career meant his appointment to the "District and Medical Council of the Palatinate". He was responsible for the overall supervision of the health system in this Bavarian administrative district with its seat in Speyer . Until his retirement ( 1875 ) he did an excellent job in his responsibility for the supervision of the medical profession, the hospitals and pharmacies in the entire Palatinate. He did not have his own doctor's office, but treated friends and relatives as well as poor citizens. His good connections to the German medical profession, e.g. B. to Rudolf Virchow in Würzburg, it was to be attributed that in the summer of 1861 the 36th meeting of German doctors and naturalists took place in Speyer.

The relationship with the father

When Johann Georg Heine left Würzburg and his family in 1829 to work in the Netherlands, it must have been a severe shock for his son Joseph. He turned down a later offer from his father to take over a house as a sanatorium in Brussels and preferred to complete his medical training in other European cities. Joseph viewed with concern the father's efforts in areas of medicine for which he was not qualified. There was only one encounter between father and son in 1838, shortly before Johann Georg's death. Joseph wanted to help the seriously ill father, but the latter stubbornly insisted on self-treatment using questionable methods. In a pamphlet that Joseph Heine published in 1842, he dealt with his father in harsh terms. Serious accusations for his break with the family, but also his unscientific approach in the last decade of his life, were followed by exuberant praise for the orthopedic surgeon Johann Georg Heine.

Joseph Heine and Anselm Feuerbach

In addition to numerous friendships with prominent contemporaries, such as the Bavarian Minister Theodor von Zwehl , the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta , the history philosopher Peter Ernst von Lasaulx and Adolf von Zerzog , Joseph Heine's relationship with the Feuerbach family was particularly intense. Heine knew and admired the uncle of the famous painter, the mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach , even as a student and after his death passed on the friendship to his older brother Joseph Anselm Feuerbach , who taught archeology in Freiburg.

Heine recognized the artistic talent of his son Anselm Feuerbach early on and tried to promote it: he and von Zwehl wanted to send the young painter to Wilhelm von Kaulbach in Munich, but the twenty-year-old traveled to Antwerp in 1850. On the way through he visited Heine in Germersheim so that the money for the trip would "be paid out", but then he confessed: "Heine was grumpy and I have to say goodbye politely, I'm sick of him, very much." This broke the connection - at least according to the evidence of the existing sources. Anselm went to Paris and finally to Rome, and Heine lost him from sight.

On his retirement in 1875, Joseph Heine was awarded the Bavarian nobility. He lived in Munich for two years and died there on November 4, 1877.

literature

• Hans Hekler: Joseph Heine - physician, politician and patron of the arts . In: D'Kräz , contributions to the history of the city and space of Schramberg . Issue 13, Schramberg 1993
• Heinz Hansen: The Heine orthopedic family - life and work of the individual family members under the sign of an important German family tradition of the nineteenth century . Dissertation, Dresden 1993

Remarks

1. ↑ Joseph Heine: Physio-pathological studies from the medical life of father and son. A memorial for Johann Georg Heine the orthopedic surgeon. , Stuttgart / Tübingen 1842.
2. ↑ Kern, GJ and Uhde-Bernays, Hermann (ed.): Anselm Feuerbach's letters to his mother, 1st volume Berlin 1911