Ludwig Edelstein

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Ludwig Edelstein (born April 23, 1902 in Berlin , † August 16, 1965 in New York City ) was a German-American classical philologist and medical historian.

Life

He studied classical philology from 1921 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität with Hermann Diels , Werner Jaeger , Eduard Norden and from 1925 at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , where he worked with Otto Regenbogen in 1929 with the work “ περὶ ἀέρων and the collection of Hippocratic Writings ” . He then worked as an assistant at the Institute for the History of Medicine at Berlin University and lecturer in the history of the exact sciences in antiquity in the Faculty of Philosophy. In 1933 he was dismissed as a Jew and his teaching post was revoked. In 1934 he emigrated to the USA via Italy. Here he taught at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore until 1947 , he was professor at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1947 , and from 1948 at the University of California, Berkeley . When he refused the oath of loyalty in the McCarthy era , he had to leave Berkeley and returned to Johns Hopkins University in 1951, since 1960 he has taught at Rockefeller University in New York as a professor of classical philosophy and the history of science.

Together with Henry E. Sigerist , Owsei Temkin and Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht, Edelstein was one of the leading German medical historians who emigrated to the USA during the Nazi era . The emigration meant a great loss of quality for the medical theoretical German research, because the hippocratism of the 1920s, in which medical professionals very strongly relied on an exaggerated figure of the Hippocrates of Kos to solve current problems in medicine, had a stable institutionalization of the Medical history led. Edelstein played a significant role in this development with editions of texts and interpretations of the Hippocratic Oath .

In his scientific work, studies of the Greek polymaths , doctors and philosophers were the focus. In addition to work on Hippocrates and Asklepios , he was co-editor of a three-volume compilation of the fragments of Poseidonios .

In 1954 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Works

  • The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, Interpretation (1943)
  • with Emma J. Edelstein: Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (1945)
  • Wieland's "Abderites" and German Humanism (1950)
  • Plato's Seventh Letter (1966)
  • The Idea of ​​Progress in Classical Antiquity (1967)
  • Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein (1967), edited by Owsei Temkin and C. Lilian Temkin
  • The Meaning of Stoicism (1968) Martin Classical Lectures Volume XXI
  • Posidonius . Ed. by Ludwig Edelstein and Ian G. Kidd . 3 Vols. Cambridge: CUP, 1972-1999. (= Cambridge classical texts and commentaries.)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member History: Ludwig Edelstein. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 26, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Edelstein, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American classical philologist and medical theorist
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1965
Place of death New York City