Ludwik Hirszfeld

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Ludwik Hirszfeld
Cmentarz św. Wawrzyńca we Wrocławiu

Ludwik Hirszfeld , also Ludwig Hirschfeld (born August 5, 1884 in Warsaw , Russian Empire ; † March 7, 1954 in Breslau , People's Republic of Poland ) was a Polish physician , microbiologist , hygienist and immunologist, as well as a medical philosopher .

Life

Ludwik Hirszfeld, son of a Jewish-Polish family, studied medicine in Würzburg and Berlin . In Berlin he was in 1907 with his thesis on hemagglutination doctorate . Hirszfeld was a co-founder of the Polish Academy of Sciences . In the years 1907–1911 he worked in Heidelberg on the designation of blood groups and contributed significantly to determining the hereditary nature of blood groups. He was a professor at the universities in Warsaw and Lublin , and since 1945 in Wroclaw . There he was involved in the development of the rhesus system of blood groups . In 1954 he became the founder of the Institute of Immunology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw.

The current names for blood groups A, B, AB and 0 were introduced by him in 1910 together with Emil von Dungern and adopted internationally in 1928.

Later he also dealt with bacteriophages . Today, the Ludwik Hirszfeld Institute for Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw is the only institute in Poland where patients with chronic bacterial infections for which antibiotics have failed can be treated with bacteriophages.

In his scientific research, Hirszfeld was convinced that blood group and “race” were related. He became the founder of seroanthropology , the racially oriented blood group research. Later he vehemently dissociated himself from racist ideas.

After the German invasion of Poland , Hirszfeld was evicted from his apartment in October 1939. The Polish Hygiene Institute Warsaw , which was under his direction at the time, became part of the Hygiene Institute Hamburg at the same time as the (German) State Institute for Hygiene Warsaw . Hirszfeld was forced out of his position and Robert Kudicke took over the management together with Ernst Georg Nauck . When all Warsaw Jews were locked up in the ghetto , Hirszfeld, as a baptized Jew, found accommodation in the parsonage of the All Saints Church within the ghetto wall. In July 1942 he fled to Miłosna, a suburb of Warsaw, where he found hiding with friends. There he lived unrecognized under a false name as an unemployed specialist in pest control. Then he fled to Klembów and saw the end of Nazi rule there. He helped found the Marie Curie University in Lublin , then in the organization of the Polish University of Wroclaw.

literature

Fonts

  • Ludwik Hirszfeld: Constitutional Serology and Blood Group Research , Berlin: Julius Springer 1928
  • Ludwik Hirszfeld: Problems of blood group research , Jena: VEB G. Fischer, 1960
  • Ludwik Hirszfeld: Historia jednego życia . Czytelnik, Warszawa, 1946, Pax, Warszawa, 1967, 1989, Czytelnik, Warszawa, 2000, ISBN 8307027314
    • Story of a life. Autobiography . Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner E. Gerabek: Hirszfeld, Ludwik. 2005, p. 603.
  2. ↑ Myriam Spörri: Pure and mixed blood: On the cultural history of blood group research, 1900-1933. transcript, Bielefeld 2013, p. 91 ff.
  3. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945. Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , p. 94
  4. ^ Joseph Parnas: Memoirs of a founding member of the Maria Curie Sklodovska University in Lublin (Poland). In: Würzburger medical historical reports 7, 1989, pp. 343–346; here's. 343 f.
personal data
SURNAME Hirszfeld, Ludwik
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hirschfeld, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Medical doctor and immunologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw , Poland
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 1954
Place of death Wroclaw , Poland