Otfrid Foerster

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Otfrid Foerster, Herbert Olivecrona and Wilhelm Tönnis
Memorial plaque for Otfrid Foerster in Breslau

Otfrid Foerster (born November 9, 1873 in Breslau ; † June 15, 1941 ibid) was a German neuroscientist who made pioneering contributions to neurology and neurosurgery . He also revolutionized the treatment of paraplegics.

Life

Otfrid Foerster was the son of the philologist and archaeologist Richard Foerster and the older brother of the military historian Wolfgang Foerster . In 1892 he passed the Abitur at the Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium in Breslau. In his youth he learned to play the flute himself and enjoyed going to the theater .

From 1892 to 1896 he studied medicine at the Universities of Freiburg im Breisgau , Kiel and Breslau . In his assessment in the Physikum , the physiologist Rudolf Heidenhain regretted that he could not do justice to Foerster's achievements even with the grade very good . In the sanatorium and nursing home of Leubus (the former monastery ) Foerster had been a student. In 1897 he passed the medical state examination in Breslau, where he received his doctorate in the same year .

At the suggestion of the neurologist Carl Wernicke , Foerster went abroad for two years after completing his doctoral thesis; he spent the winter in Paris with Joseph Jules Dejerine - where he could also hear Pierre Marie and Joseph Babinski - in the summer he was with Heinrich Frenkel (1860–1931) in Heiden , Switzerland , to study exercise therapy for nervous patients.

Foerster grew up at a time when neurology began to develop out of internal medicine and psychiatry through Carl Wernicke , among others through Jean-Martin Charcot , Wilhelm Erb and William Richard Gowers . He clearly committed himself to the functional-localization direction of neurology. His great interest in the anatomy of the central nervous system grew from his collaboration with Wernicke, whose assistant Foerster was in Breslau from 1899 to 1904. In 1903 Foerster completed his habilitation in neurology at Wernicke. The two researchers published an atlas of the brain in 1903.

The neurological schools were essentially geared towards diagnosis ; there were hardly any possibilities for effective therapy . It was thanks to Foerster that exercise therapy was adopted in patients with neurological disorders. This gave him a theoretical interest in the coordinative disturbances in the course of movements, to which his habilitation thesis (1902) was directed. The work became very topical in connection with the systematic introduction of rehabilitation into medicine. The importance of the spinal reflex arc in the development of spasticity suggested a possible treatment by interrupting the sensitive thigh, and in 1908 Foerster recommended cutting the posterior root ( Foerster's operation ) to remove the spasticity. In 1909 Foerster was appointed associate professor in Breslau, in 1917 a full honorary professor and in 1921 a full professor of neurology and a personal full professor (without his own chair) at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University. He had turned down calls to Heidelberg and foreign universities.

After Foerster was given a ward at the Allerheiligen Hospital in Breslau in 1911, he performed neurosurgical operations there with Alexander Tietze and Küttner. He had acquired his surgical skills primarily from Johann von Mikulicz . From 1914 to 1920 Foerster was in the nerve department of the Breslau field hospital of VI. Army Corps active. During the First World War (1915) he reported on the results of his surgical treatment of 1490 gunshot wounds with nerve damage, later he also operated on other brain and spinal cord injuries . In 1920 he became a primary physician in the Wenzel Hancke Municipal Hospital. When Lenin suffered an acute circulatory disorder in the brain in May 1922, the Moscow leadership called Otfrid Foerster to his sick bed. He gained the trust of his patient and was amicably adored by him. He stayed almost uninterrupted for a year and a half, i.e. until shortly before Lenin's death, at the sickbed in Moscow and later in Gorky .

Due to Foerster's work, Breslau became a place of attraction, especially for US neurologists and neurosurgeons. His student Wilder Penfield continued Foerster's life's work of analyzing the cerebral cortex and researching epilepsy . There were also Percival Bailey , who brought with him the new classification of brain tumors, and Paul Bucy , who published a fundamental monograph on the motor cortex. Foerster's leading position in German neurology had been recognized since 1924. He stood next to Max Nonne and, as his successor, was chairman of the Society of German Neurologists for eight years until 1932 .

Foerster's tombstone

In the decade from 1925 to 1935, Foerster used all available analytical methods in his research. In 1932 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina , in 1935 he received the Cothenius Medal of the Leopoldina.

He systematically examined all clinical disorders electrophysiologically. It emerged fundamental work on the electrical phenomena in the reflex disorders of the pyramidal tract syndrome in the pallidum lesions, etc.

With the help of the Rockefeller Foundation and support from the State of Prussia , he was able to open a new “Neurological Research Institute” in 1934, which was later renamed in his name. During this time, Ludwig Guttmann learned from him, who later, after fleeing the Nazis to England in 1939, placed the treatment of paraplegics on a new basis and became a great promoter of disabled sports and the founder of the Paralympic Games .

Together with Oswald Bumke, Otfrid Foerster was co-editor of the monumental work Handbuch der Neurologie , in which he wrote several chapters himself.

In 1935 he was awarded the Jackson Memorial Medal on the occasion of the 100th birthday of John Hughlings Jackson . In 1938 Foerster retired . He died of tuberculosis in his hometown on June 15, 1941 and was buried on June 19, 1941 together with his wife Martha, who died on June 17. Since 1953 the German Society for Neurosurgery has awarded him the Otfrid Foerster Medal in his honor .

bibliography

  • Physiology and Pathology of Coordination , Jena 1902
  • Atlas of the brain , edited by Carl Wernicke, Berlin 1903
  • Contributions to brain surgery , Berlin 1909
  • The contractures in diseases of the pyramidal tract , Berlin 1909
  • About the influence of spastic paralysis by resection of the posterior spinal cord roots in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde Volume 41 of 1911, Issue 1–3, Pages 146–171
  • On the pathogenesis and surgical treatment of epilepsy , Leipzig 1925
  • Otfried Foerster, Sir Ludwig Guttmann : Cerebral complications in thrombangiitis obliterans . Julius Springer publisher, 1933 ( Google Books ).
  • The pain and its operative treatment , Halle 1935

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Russell Silver: History of the Treatment of Spinal Injuries. In: JR Soc Med. Volume 97, number 3, 2004, pp. 148-149. PMC 1182285 (free full text)
personal data
SURNAME Foerster, Otfrid
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 1941
Place of death Wroclaw