Otto Gottlieb Mohnike

Otto Mohnike, Japanese woodcut from the Meiji period ( Chūgai Iji Shinpō )

Otto Gottlieb Johann Mohnike (born July 27, 1814 in Stralsund , † January 26, 1887 in Bonn ) was a German doctor and naturalist . He was the first in Japan to carry out a successful vaccination with cowpox viruses and thus helped the vaccination to break through.

Life

Otto Gottlieb Johann Mohnike was the son of the theologian, philologist and translator Gottlieb CF Mohnike and his wife Karoline, a daughter of the doctor Dr. Johann Philipp von Stucker. Mohnike put in Greifswald graduated from high school and began in 1832 at the University of Greifswald , a philology studies , but soon switched to medicine. On November 4, 1833, he enrolled at the Bonn Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, where he continued his medical studies. In 1835 he became a member of the Corps Rhenania Bonn . Other places of study were Breslau and Berlin , where he received his doctorate in 1837.

Ernst Moritz Arndt , a friend of his father's, taught in Bonn what the reason for the change may have been. His father wanted to move from Stralsund to Koblenz for political reasons , but did not take the position.

Mohnike returned to his hometown Stralsund after graduating. There he practiced as a doctor and from 1841 devoted himself to his father's estate. He arranged for a 5th edition of the translation of the Frithjofssage , translated the novel “ Vathek ” by William Beckford (printed in 1842) and published his father's Lessingiana in 1843 before moving to Berlin .

In 1844 he joined the Dutch-Indian Army , which was founded in 1830 and was subordinate to the Colonial Ministry, as a health officer, 3rd class (officier van gezondheid 3e kl.) . Mohnike first served on Java (1844-47) and Sumatra (1847-48) before he was posted to the Dutch Dejima factory in Nagasaki , where he worked until 1851. Here he took care of the health of the few Europeans at the trading post, instructed Japanese doctors like all his predecessors in office and treated local patients from time to time.

As everywhere else, smallpox, which had struck the country every three decades since the 8th century, was feared in Japan. In Kyushu and the western regions of Honshū , the Central Asian variolation of the nasal mucosa has been practiced since the 18th century , but the mortality rate was 2 to 3 percent. In 1793, the Dutch trading doctor Ambrosius Ludovicus Bernard Keller demonstrated the variation over the skin of the upper arm, which could reduce the mortality rate to less than 1 percent. In 1812 Nakagawa Gorōji (1768-1848), who had learned the vaccination while imprisoned in Siberia, returned to northern Japan. The Russian book he brought with him was published in Japanese in 1820. In 1824 he carried out vaccinations in Matsumae, but he passed on his knowledge only to a limited extent, which is why he ultimately failed to make a nationwide breakthrough. In 1823 the trading doctor Nikolaas Tulling demonstrated the vaccination in Nagasaki in the presence of three Japanese doctors. In the same year Philipp Franz von Siebold brought lymph from Batavia to Nagasaki, but it did not work properly. In 1843, the Japanese doctor Koyama Shisei (1807–1862) vaccinated children with a mixture of human pox and cowpox pustules. His book was published in 1847. The environment for spreading the vaccination was thus well prepared. In the same year 1847 asked Narabayashi Sōken, personal physician and interpreter of the sovereign of the Saga domain , Nabeshima Naomasa, the manager of the Dejima factory for the delivery of fresh vaccine.

Mohnike brought it with her from Batavia in the summer of 1848, but this time too it had lost its effectiveness during the transport. In 1849 new lymph arrived from Batavia, with which three children were vaccinated. Only with Narabayashi Kenzaburō, the third son of Narabayashi Sōken, developed the vaccine pox necessary for further vaccinations. Lymph from this smallpox pustule was first used in Nagasaki. In Saga, the sovereign Nabeshima Naomasa had his son Jun'ichirō vaccinated, which greatly promoted acceptance among the population. Many Japanese doctors were already familiar with the concept of vaccination and hurried to Nagasaki, partly on the orders of their rulers and partly of their own accord, to get lymph. In the following decades there was a rapid spread of vaccination and the development of an institutional framework. In 1874 the Meiji government passed a vaccination law, according to which children between the ages of 70 and 365 had to be vaccinated for the first time. Booster vaccinations were given every seven years. This contributed to the rapid population growth in Japan during the Meiji period .

Mohnike also brought the first stethoscope ( Laënnec type) to Japan, which he gave to Yoshio Keisai, a doctor from Kumamoto . In 1850 he had the opportunity to take part in the factory manager's trip to Edo, so that he also got to know some of the country's inner regions. The service in Japan ended in the fall of 1851.

Afterwards Mohnike worked as a doctor and natural scientist on Borneo (1852–54), Ambon (1854–61) and Java (1861–69) and rose during this time to senior army surgeon 1st class. He published his first observations in the Geneeskundig tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indie (I / 1853, III / 1854, VIII / 1861). After his honorable discharge as general practitioner in 1869, he settled as a general practitioner in Bonn with his wife Anna Catharina Miltenberg and the children Isabella Ottilie Elisabeth and Otto Bernhard Ulrich . Three years later he published a description of the physique as well as the "mental abilities and moral character" of the Japanese. This was followed by further work on his observations in Southeast Asia as well as various articles in "Globus" and other magazines.

Mohnike died in 1887 of complications from a stroke. The grave slab in the Old Cemetery in Bonn (Section IV, No. 546a) was restored in the summer of 2000 with the support of the Japanese Society for the History of Medicine .

Fonts

• De instinctu sexuali eiusque natura atque causis (dissertation, Berolini: Feister, 1837) ( digitized version )
• The Japanese - an ethnographic monograph (Aschendorff'sche Buchhandlung, Münster , 1872) digitized
• Banka and Palembang along with reports on Sumatra in general (Aschendorff'sche Buchhandlung, Münster , 1874)
• About truant people (Aschendorff'sche Buchhandlung, Münster , 1878)
• Glimpses of plant and animal life in the Dutch Malay countries (Aschendorff'sche Buchhandlung, Münster , 1883)
• Monkey and primitive man (Aschendorff'sche Buchhandlung, Münster , 1888)
• Overview of the cetonids of the Sunda Islands and Moluccas (Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung: Berlin, 1872) ( digitized version )
• Popular superstition. Legends and traditions of the Japanese . In: Globus. Illustrated magazine for country and ethnology, Vol. 21 (1872), pp. 330–332
• The Chinese in California and the Dutch East Indies . In: Globus. Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde, Vol. 37 (1880), pp. 231–235, 248–251, 266–269, 280–284

literature

• Mohnike, Otto Gottlieb Johann . In: Grete Grewolls: Who was who in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania? A dictionary of persons . Edition Temmen, Bremen 1995, ISBN 3-86108-282-9 , p. 294.
• Johannes H. Wilhelm. Otto Gottlieb Johann Mohnike (1814–1887). Pomeranian and Bonn traces . In: Hilaria Gössmann, Andreas Mrugalla (eds.): 11th German-speaking Japanologentag in Trier 1999: Vol. 1 History, intellectual history, religions, society, politics, law, economy . LIT Verlag, Berlin-Hamburg-Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8258-4463-3 , p. 111f. ( Digitized version )
• Tadomi Aikawa: Otto Gottlieb J. Mohnike (1814-1887) and the introduction of the smallpox vaccination in Japan in 1849. Catalog for the exhibition in Germany 2000/2001 . Translated from the Japanese by Andreas Mettenleiter . German Medical History Museum, Ingolstadt 2001.
• Matsuki Akitomo. Nakagawa Gorōji to Shiberia keiyu no gyūtō-shutōhō [Nakagawa Gorōji and the vaccination mediated via Siberia]. Hokkaidō Shuppan Kikakusentaa, 2009 (575 pp. With English summary)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 15 , 191
2. ^ "Vathek", digitized version ( memento of the original from August 17, 2016 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. 
3. ↑ Lessingiana, digitized version ( Memento of the original dated August 17, 2016 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. 
4. ↑ More about the ranks achieved in the Dutch Health service in the Nieuw Nederlandsch biographically woordenboek. Deel 10 (1937)
5. ↑ Otto Mohnike on the Japanese and Japanese society
6. ↑ Here powder obtained from smallpox pustules was introduced into the nose.
7. ↑ The skin was scratched with an infectious lancet and the infectious material was rubbed into the wound. This procedure had come to Europe via Turkey.
8. ↑ More at Matsuki (2009)
9. ↑ With this groundbreaking achievement, Koyama was able to significantly reduce the mortality rate. More at Yamamoto Kyōsuke. Shutōi Koyama Shisei no shōgai [The Life of Vaccine Doctor Koyama Shisei]. Tōkyō: Jiji tsūshinsha, 1994
10. ↑ Tadomi Aikawa / Andreas Mettenleiter: Otto Gottlieb J. Mohnike (1814–1887) and the introduction of the smallpox vaccination in Japan in 1849 .
11. ↑ Keisai was one of the leading pioneers of vaccination. Mohnike's stethoscope is now in the collection of the Nagasaki University Library, Faculty of Medicine. ( Photo ( Memento of the original from May 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ) 
12. ↑ Otto Mohnike on the Japanese and Japanese society

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Gottlieb Mohnike in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Otto Gottlieb Mohnike in the state bibliography MV
• Otto Gottlieb J. Mohnike and the introduction of the smallpox vaccination in Japan in 1849