Julius Mannhardt

Julius Mannhardt

Julius Wilhelm Leberecht Mannhardt (* February 8, 1834 in Hanerau , Duchy of Holstein ; † November 24, 1893 there) was a well-traveled German ophthalmologist who was also active as a writer and diplomat .

Life and work

Julius Mannhardt was the son of Charlotte Amalie and Wilhelm Mannhardt (1800–1890), who set up a private boarding school for boys near the Hanerau manor belonging to the family . His son Julius attended a grammar school in Hamburg and then studied medicine at the universities of Heidelberg , Göttingen , Berlin and Kiel . In Göttingen he joined the Hannovera fraternity in the winter semester of 1853/54 . In 1856 he passed the state medical examination in Kiel. The following year he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD with the dissertation "De pseudarthrosi " (= non-healing of fractures).

Julius Mannhardt took over an orthopedic clinic in Altona in 1863 on the recommendation of Friedrich von Esmarch , professor of surgery in Kiel , who was very likely known to the Mannhardt family . His interest turned more and more to ophthalmology. In 1865 he settled in Hamburg as an ophthalmologist, but continued his education in this subject with Albrecht von Graefe in Berlin and with Herman Snellen and Franciscus Cornelis Donders in Utrecht.

In 1867 he went to Istanbul and practiced there as an ophthalmologist. The work gave him great pleasure, especially since the colorful oriental flair of the city could also be found in his practice. He reported about this in letters to his family back home. He also discovered that Armenian porters who lived together in large groups in Istanbul without any family members were significantly more likely to develop blindness-causing trachoma than, for example, Turkish soldiers who lived in barracks. He rightly attributed this to an infection that occurred far more frequently among the Christian Armenians than among the Muslim Turks, because, in his opinion, the latter had a greater need for fresh air and cleanliness, especially when they washed themselves in running water.

In 1869 Mannhardt moved to Florence , the then capital of the Kingdom of Italy . Here, too, he practiced as an ophthalmologist. Now he could bring his family from Holstein to join them. His son Wilhelm L. Mannhardt died there on December 13, 1873 at the age of 12 and was buried in the Protestant, so-called English cemetery. The same happened to his daughter Mathilde, who died on January 12, 1876 at the age of 13. Mannhardt stayed in Florence until 1878. During this time he traveled to Italy, visited a. a. Rome , Naples and Bagni di Lucca . Once a trip took him beyond Italy to Tunis . He also worked as an ophthalmologist at all the places where he stayed for a long time.

The legations of the North German Confederation both in Istanbul and in Florence had reported to Berlin that Julius Mannhardt was, in terms of his personality and his energy, someone who could be assigned a secret diplomatic mission if necessary. One such emerged in 1870 shortly after the outbreak of the Franco-German War . On the instructions of the Foreign Office of the North German Confederation, i.e. in agreement with Bismarck , Julius Mannhardt was requested by the envoy of the North German Confederation in Florence to visit Giuseppe Garibaldi on Isola Caprera , a small island north of Sardinia, to discuss the presentation with him to negotiate an auxiliary corps on the German side in the war against France. In return for appropriate subsidies, Garibaldi declared himself ready and promised to intervene with up to 30,000 men. However, Garibaldi made a weighty reservation: he only wanted to fight against the French Empire , not against a republican France. Since both negotiating partners could not imagine the latter form of government for France in the very near future, Mannhardt accepted the reservation and Garibaldi declared himself an ally of the German armies. When Mannhardt returned to Florence and reported the successful conclusion of the negotiations to the envoy of the North German Confederation, he showed him a dispatch that had just arrived, in which the outcome of the Battle of Sedan on September 1, 1870 was reported: Surrender of a large part of the French army and Imprisonment of Emperor Napoleon III . Both interviewees assumed that the war was over - and Mannhardt remarked that his trip to Caprera had been useless. They could not imagine that the war would continue and that Garibaldi would use his reservation in negotiations with Mannhardt to go to the south of France with a group of volunteers in support of the Republican cause. There were a few skirmishes with German troops, but Garibaldi's intervention was ultimately not decisive for the outcome of the war.

After returning to Holstein, Mannhardt worked as an ophthalmologist in Hanerau and Neumünster . As early as 1880 he embarked on another trip, this time to Venezuela , the country of birth of his wife Mathilde, née Vollmer y Rivas (1842–1896), a piano virtuoso with whom he had nine children. He practiced as an ophthalmologist in Venezuela for several months.

His trip to South America (including Havana, the Azores) is documented in the transcription of letters to his family "Letters from America". They begin on October 8, 1880 (“On board the Royal Mail Ship Cagus”) and end on February 15, 1881 (in the Commercial Hotel on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas). Here, too, he apparently worked as an ophthalmologist: "Here (in St. Thomas, author's note) is a man from Porto Rico who is expecting me and wants an operation. So I will hardly be able to leave for Havana on the 16th".

After their return in 1881, the family moved into the " Fernsicht " estate in Kellinghusen, from where Mannhardt looked after his practice in Neumünster. Theodor Storm was well known to the entire family ; In 1880 he moved from Husum to Hademarschen , but also visited Julius Mannhardt in Kellinghusen and met the poet Detlev von Liliencron there in 1884 .

A sciatica caused Julius Mannhardt later to move to Lübeck . He died in his place of birth in 1893, his wife on May 24, 1896 in Lübeck.

Publications

• De pseudarthrosi (= writings of the University of Kiel. Vol. 4,7, Med. 2). CF Mohr, Kiel 1857, 11 p. (Medical dissertation, University of Kiel, 1857).

The knowledge that Mannhardt had gained as an ophthalmologist between 1858 and 1887 was published in ten essays in Albrecht von Graefe's Archives for Ophthalmology and in the Clinical Monthly Journal for Ophthalmology and is listed in Dieter Schmidt's essay . Below is:

• Clinical reports from Constantinople. In: Archives for Ophthalmology. Vol. 14, H. 3 (October 1868), pp. 26-50, doi: 10.1007 / BF02720672 .

Julius Mannhardt also wrote novellas - supported by Theodor Storm.

• Tales from the baths of Lucca. Theodor Storm wrote a foreword to this work . With this preface, the story of a faux ménage appeared under the pseudonym G. Dur in: Westermanns Monatshefte . Volume 58 (1885), pp. 655-669.
• Mrs. Venus , without author, in: Die Grenzboten . 59th year (1900), first quarter, pp. 37–44 and 92–98.

Mannhardt dealt with ideological problems and anonymously published the 436-page work

• A catechism of morals and politics for the German people. Verlag von EL Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1891. A second edition was printed in the same year. Several years after Mannhardt's death, the book was reprinted in 1921.

literature

• Alfred Stern : Bismarck and Garibaldi during the Franco-German War 1870–71. In: Deutsche Rundschau . Vol. 60, H. 5 (February 1934), pp. 89-95.
• Clifford Albrecht Bernd (Ed.): Theodor Storm - Paul Heyse: Correspondence. Vol. 3: 1882-1888. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1974, p. 348, note “To 231”, No. 4 ( online at Google Books ).
• Karl Ernst Laage (ed.): Theodor Storm - Erich Schmidt: Correspondence. Vol. 2: 1880-1888. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, p. 208, note “To 102”, No. 10 ( online at Google Books ).
• Dieter Schmidt : Julius Wilhelm Leberecht Mannhardt (1834–1893), a well-traveled ophthalmologist of the past century. In: Communications of the Julius Hirschberg Society on the history of ophthalmology. Volume 1 (2000), pp. 253-265 ( abstract ).
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft . Vol. 1, Part. 8, Supplement L-Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-8253-6051-1 , pp. 63-65.

Web links

• Mention on the website of the practice Dr. med. Gellrich
• Fraternity Hannovera, history and stories

Individual evidence

1. ^ Henning Tegtmeyer : Directory of members of the fraternity Hannovera Göttingen 1848–1998, Düsseldorf 1998, p. 19
2. ↑ Alphabetical register opf the tombs in the protestant cemetery in Florence ( Memento of the original from October 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 1, 2013.  
3. ↑ Wilhelm (1861–1873), Mathilde (1862–1876), Wolf (1864–1938), Franziska Viktoria (* 1865), Gustav Julius (* 1868), Giulia Charlotte (* 1870), Paolo Heinrich (* 1873), Maria Natalia (* 1874), married to Eduard Kulenkamp , Emilie Valentine (* 1877), according to Mathilde De La Merced Rivas , ancestry.com , accessed December 1, 2013.
4. ^ Karl Ernst Laage (ed.): Theodor Storm - Erich Schmidt: Briefwechsel. Vol. 2: 1880-1888. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, p. 208, note “To 102”, No. 10 ( online at Google Books ).
5. ^ ^{A b} Clifford Albrecht Bernd (ed.): Theodor Storm - Paul Heyse: Correspondence. Vol. 3: 1882-1888. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1974, p. 348, note “To 231”, No. 4 ( online at Google Books ).