Julius Wagner-Jauregg

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Julius Wagner-Jauregg

Julius Wagner-Jauregg (until 1883 Julius Wagner , from 1883 to 1919 Julius Wagner Ritter von Jauregg , born March 7, 1857 in Wels , † September 27, 1940 in Vienna ) was an Austrian psychiatrist . For his discovery of the importance of malaria therapy for the treatment of progressive paralysis , he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 ; other areas of work were the treatment of psychoses , syphilis and thyroid diseases .

Life

Armorial coat of arms of the Wagner-Jauregg family, 1883.
The professors at the Medical University of Vienna, chalk drawing by Olga Prager, Vienna 1908–1910. In the Dean's Office of the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna. Edmund von Neusser , Siegmund Exner-Ewarten , Isidor Schnabel , Ferdinand Hochstetter , Alfons Edler von Rosthorn , Anton Weichselbaum , Leopold Schrötter von Kristelli , Heinrich Obersteiner , Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Viktor von Ebner-Rofenstein , Carl Toldt , Gustav Riehl , Ottokar von Chiari , Anton von Frisch , Ernst Fuchs , Anton Freiherr von Eiselberg , Hans Horst Meyer , Ernst Ludwig , Rudolf Chrobak , Theodor Escherich , Alexander Kolisko , Julius von Hochenegg , Arthur Schattenfroh , Carl von Noorden , Emil Zuckerkandl , Richard Paltauf , Gustav Gärtner , Leopold Oser , Josef Moeller , Alois Monti , Julius Mauthner , Viktor Urbantschitsch , August Leopold von Reuss , Adolf von Strümpell , Ernest Finger , Adolf Lorenz , Friedrich Schauta
The Upper Austrian state mental hospital in Linz is named after Julius Wagner-Jauregg.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was born as Julius Wagner and son of the financial lawyer Johann Adolf Wagner (1835-1917), who served as Finance Councilor in Vienna in 1883, i.e. at a time when his two sons Julius and Fritz (the younger son later became section head and general post director and was one of the pioneers of Austrian aviation) were already grown up, received the hereditary title of nobility "Knight of Jauregg". The family lived in Vienna, where Julius Wagner also since 1872 Matura at Schottengymnasium took off as the top student and 1874 to study medicine at the University of Vienna began, which he in 1880 with the promotion graduated as a doctor of medicine. Since his studies he was a member of the Vienna Academic Gymnastics Club and the Academic Choral Society Vienna, which later became the Vienna University Choir Ghibellinen and is known today as the University Choir Barden zu Wien .

Until 1882 he worked at the Institute for General and Experimental Pathology at the University of Salomon Stricker , where he had already published two scientific papers. Stricker was known for his orientation towards animal experiments. After a brief interlude at the Department of Internal Medicine , he then became Maximilian Leidesdorf's assistant at the so-called Lower Austrian State Insane Asylum . Psychiatry was not originally Wagner-Jauregg's preferred field of medicine - but the young doctor and enthusiastic athlete (mountaineer, swimmer, rider) described as ambitious, unyielding and tough, took advantage of the professional opportunity that was given. In 1885 he qualified as a professor for nervous diseases and psychiatry and gave lectures on the pathology of the nervous system.

In 1889, Wagner von Jauregg succeeded Richard von Krafft-Ebing at the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at the University of Graz . One of his research interests was in the Steiermark frequent cretinism . He achieved good success in its prevention and the prevention of goiter by adding small amounts of iodine to drinking water and table salt . Last but not least, he had studied both during his day-long hikes through the Styrian mountain regions.

In 1893 Wagner-Jauregg became associate professor for psychiatry and nervous diseases and director of the Lower Austrian state hospital for the mentally ill in Vienna. In 1902 he moved to the Psychiatric Clinic of the Vienna University in the General Hospital, and in 1911 he returned to his previous post.

After Wagner-Jauregg had declared the then most famous Austrian operetta actor , Alexander Girardi , to be mentally ill at the instigation of his wife without having examined him , the “Neurology” was initiated on the initiative of the actress Katharina Schratt , a friend of Emperor Franz-Joseph -Reform "initiated.

As early as 1883 Wagner-Jauregg had noticed the healing effect of fever attacks in patients suffering from paralysis . After attempts with tuberculin in Graz in the winter of 1890/91 had shown little success, he succeeded in 1917 in successfully treating progressive paralysis that occurred as a result of neurolues , a form of syphilis , by inducing fever with the help of malaria pathogens ( Malaria therapy ). For this discovery, Wagner-Jauregg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 . This therapy was practiced until the advent of antibiotics .

During the First World War , Wagner-Jauregg was also responsible for the treatment of war neuroses and tried very hard to separate simulators from real mentally ill patients. The fact that he used compulsory electrical therapy in this context soon met with criticism. After the end of the war, politically motivated articles in newspapers led to an investigation by the “Commission for the Survey of Violations of Military Duties”. Sigmund Freud expressed himself not uncritically in the corresponding investigation, but ultimately in favor of Wagner-Jauregg, as this treatment had proven to be very effective.

Personal

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was married to Balbine Frumkin for the first time , from whom he called himself divorced in 1903. He married Anna Koch for the second time . The couple had children Julia (* 1900) and the chemist Theodor Wagner-Jauregg . Wagner-Jauregg enjoyed doing sports, especially horse riding and mountaineering. In his private life, he only wore suits and coats made of blue cloth, the cut of which was modeled on the Sunday robe of a mountain farmer. If a new item of clothing is required, all it takes is a call to his tailor without trying it on beforehand. He used to buy books - with the exception of specialist books - as paperbacks and to disassemble them into manageable individual parts in order to read them on walks and during tram rides.

Relationship to National Socialism

Since the end of the 1990s, Die Grünen - Die Grüne Alternative and the KPÖ have been trying to rename streets, squares and health facilities named after Wagner-Jauregg, and that his grave in the Vienna Central Cemetery (Group 32 C, number 18) the status the grave of honor is revoked. Wagner-Jauregg was accused of having connections to the NSDAP , of spreading National Socialist ideas, and of representing eugenic and racial hygiene ideas such as forced sterilization . The women's suffrage called Wagner-Jauregg as degeneration . These and other allegations, raised in the report of a historian's commission on the investigation of the graves of honor in the Vienna Central Cemetery from 1938 to 1945, led to an extensive investigation commissioned by the Province of Upper Austria . According to their report, Wagner-Jauregg was socio-politically conservative and supported the Greater German People's Party as a member . His application for membership in the NSDAP, made on April 21, 1940, was posthumously "deferred because of race ..." (Wagner-Jauregg's first wife was Jewish). In keeping with the spirit of the times, the Nobel Prize laureate also represented eugenic ideas, but was ultimately classified in the report as "not historically burdened", which was criticized primarily by the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance .

However, his name is also on a list of members of the Deutschsozialen Volksbund, a cover organization to which some people close to National Socialism such as Arthur Seyß-Inquart , Anton Reinthaller , Ernst Prinzhorn and Alfred Orel belonged. The Volksbund, however, did not get beyond the planning stage due to the " connection " that had taken place. According to Michael Hubenstorf , malaria therapy, which was medically obsolete two decades after its discovery and whose therapeutic approach raised medical-ethical questions from the very beginning , paved the way for the inhuman malaria experiments of the 1940s.

Honors

Grave of the Wagner-Jauregg family at Vienna's central cemetery

Fonts (selection)

  • Research on cretinism. Vienna 1893.
  • To reform the insane. Vienna 1901.
  • Prevention and treatment of progressive paralysis due to vaccine malaria. Handbook of Experimental Therapy 1931.
  • Fever and infection therapy. Vienna u. a. 1936.

literature

  • Kurt Eissler : Freud and Wagner-Jauregg before the commission for the survey of military breaches of duty. Löcker, Vienna 1979, new edition 2006.
  • Magda Whitrow: Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857-1940) . Facultas Universitätsverlag, Vienna 2001 (Original edition: Smith-Gordon, London 1993).
  • Wolfgang Neugebauer , Kurt Scholz , Peter Schwarz (eds.): Julius Wagner-Jauregg in the field of tension between political ideas and interests - an inventory. Contributions from the workshop from 6./7. November 2006 in the Vienna City Hall. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2008 (Vienna Lectures: Research, 3).

Web links

Commons : Julius Wagner-Jauregg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Titles of nobility and their use as additions to names were banned in Austria in 1919 with the Nobility Repeal Act.
  2. ^ The faculty of the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, Vienna 1908-1910 . Photo credits: Collections of the Medical University of Vienna - Josephinum, picture archive; Associated personal identification .
  3. ↑ a b Sonia Horn: Julius Wagner von Jauregg , in: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the 20th century , 1st edition 1995 CH Beck Munich p. 368 + 369, medical dictionary. From antiquity to the present , 2nd edition 2001, pp. 321 + 322, 3rd edition 2006 Springer Verlag Heidelberg, Berlin, New York pp. 334 + 335. Medical glossary 2006 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .
  4. ↑ Arthur Frhr. v. Hochstetter: Julius Wagner von Jauregg , in: Deutsche Sängerschaft . Gegr. 1895 as Akademische Sängerzeitung 13 (1927), pp. 353–354.
  5. ^ Bangen, Hans: History of the drug therapy of schizophrenia. Berlin 1992. pp. 32-37 fever therapies ISBN 3-927408-82-4
  6. ^ Sigmund Freud: Expert opinion on the electrical treatment of war neurotics. 1920.
  7. ↑ Great Austrians. Ueberreuter, 1985, Ed. Thomas Chorherr , Author: Pia Maria Plechl
  8. ^ The question of membership in the NSDAP in the report Wagner-Jauregg 2005 ( Memento from December 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Person file 16579 of the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance
  10. ↑ a b c Street names in Vienna since 1860 as “Political Places of Remembrance” (PDF; 4.4 MB), p. 232ff, final research project report, Vienna, July 2013
  11. ↑ Member entry by Julius Wagner Ritter von Jauregg (with picture) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 10, 2016.
  12. ↑ encyclopedia team of the publisher FABrockhaus (ed.): Nobel Prizes . Chronicle of outstanding achievements. Mannheim 2001, ISBN 3-7653-0491-3 , pp. 272 .
  13. ↑ 500 Schilling banknote on 3833.com ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2008 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.3833.com
personal data
SURNAME Wagner-Jauregg, Julius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wagner von Jauregg, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian psychiatrist, Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH catfish
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 1940
Place of death Vienna