Otto Guttentag

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Otto Ernst Guttentag (born February 5, 1900 in Stettin ; † January 13, 1992 in Piedmont , Alameda County ) was a German-American doctor with a focus on clinical homeopathy research and medical ethics .

Live and act

Otto Guttentag came from a family of doctors in Szczecin . He studied medicine in Marburg , Jena , Heidelberg , Munich , Berlin and Halle . 1918–1927 in Halle and 1927–1933 in Frankfurt he was assistant to the nephrologist Franz Volhard . In 1923 he received his license to practice medicine in Halle and his doctorate in 1924. Further training in biochemistry and pharmacology complemented his training.

homeopathy

In May 1925, the Berlin surgeon August Bier called on the "orthodox doctors" to evaluate homeopathy without prejudice. At the same time Otto Guttentag saw how a patient at the Halle clinic who suffered from Graves' disease recovered after homeopathic treatment. With the permission of his superior Franz Volhard, under the guidance of the experienced homeopath Josef Schier, he was allowed to treat selected cases in the clinic with homeopathic remedies. During his vacation, he continued his education at the homeopathic hospital in Stuttgart. Here, in addition to the chief physician Alfons Stiegele, he also met his colleagues Fritz Donner and Karl Kötschau . In 1927 he followed his boss Franz Volhard from Halle to Frankfurt. There he was in charge of a 50-bed research department where, together with Schier, he carried out double-blind studies on the therapeutic benefits of homeopathic treatment.

Escape

Because of his Jewish origin, Otto Guttentag was threatened by the law enacted on April 7, 1933 to restore the civil service . He seized the first opportunity to flee abroad. As early as 1933 he accepted an invitation from the Homoeopathic Foundation of California to San Francisco to set up a research laboratory there. In 1936 he received a professorship in homeopathy at the University of California Medical School . An American citizen since 1940, he served as a medical officer in the US armed forces after the USA entered the war . After the war he was stationed in Germany until 1947.

Back in Europe

In 1946, the Education and Religious Affairs Branch (ERA) of the Office of Military Government for Germany (US) ( OMGUS ) commissioned Ernst Guttentag, together with the deans of the medical faculties of German universities, to make recommendations in the American zone on the reform of medical education in Germany to work out. As an expert on both German and American medical studies, he should investigate the extent to which elements of American medical training could be integrated into the German training regulations. The reason for this action by the American occupation authorities was a letter from the dean of the medical faculty of the University of Frankfurt am Main , Franz Volhard , to OMGUS, in which he had pointed out that a reorganization of the German universities would be a good opportunity to reform medical studies according to the American one Role model. In 1947 Guttentag attended medical faculties in the American and Soviet zones of occupation in Germany.

Also in 1947 he got in touch again with Karl Kötschau , with whom he had been close friends since the 1920s. He campaigned for his release from an internment camp for NSDAP members. They shared a common criticism of conventional medicine and a common interest in homeopathy. However, there were substantial differences between them.

  • In the tenor of his earlier writings on racial hygiene, Kötschau called for the healing of the sick “people's body”, which was weakened by too much “care and protection” and a lack of natural exercise and whose genetic material was damaged by civilization poisons and “lack of extermination and selection”. The weak, chronically ill had no place in Kötschau's natural and performance medicine.
  • Guttentag, on the other hand, advocated the protection of the chronically ill in his writings. At a symposium on human experimentation in 1951, he advocated the abolition of the term "hopelessly incurably ill". This lowers the inhibition threshold for risky medical experiments on the terminally ill and violates the original core of the doctor-patient relationship as a relationship between the doctor as a friend and the patient as the person in need. Guttentag warned: “It is not the conquest of nature that seems to be the basic problem of our time, but the redefinition of man. . . We have to be on our guard against ourselves so that in our pursuit of truth we do not create healthy bodies at the expense of morally dull souls ”.

Works

  • Histamine and histamine-like substances in the blood. In: Naunyn-Schmiedebergs archive for experimental pathology and pharmacology, Vol. 162 (1931) pp. 727-738, doi : 10.1007 / BF01864146
  • The person in the hospital. In: Das neue Frankfurt: international monthly for the problems of cultural redesign. Issue 4/5 (April / May 1931), pp. 84–90 (digitized version )
  • Trends toward Homeopathy, Present and Past. In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine Vol. 8 (1940) H. 1 (Jan) pp. 1172-93
  • Further notes on medical education in Germany. In: JAMA , 1948, Vol. 138, H. 5 (October 2) pp. 380-1
  • Review of the book: Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke. Doctors of Infamy. In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Vol. 24 (1950) pp. 497-500
  • The Problem of Experimentation on Human Beings. II. The Physician's Point of View. In: Science . 117: 207-210 (1953)

literature

  • Jonathan Davidson: A Century of Homeopaths. Their Influence on Medicine and Health. Springer, New York - Heidelberg 2014, pp. 165–168: Bioethics and the Contributions of Otto Guttentag ISBN 978-1-4939-0526-3
  • Robert Jütte : Homeopathy and National Socialism - a historical expertise (as of May 16, 2013). Pp. 9-11
  • Christian Pross :
    • The Attitude of German Émigré Doctors Towards Medicine under National Socialism. In: Social History of Medicine 22 (2009), No. 3, pp. 531–552 (here: p. 543)
    • The view of German émigré doctors on Nazi “racial hygiene”. In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt 107 (2010) issue 50 (December 17), A2494–2496 (here: 2495) (digitized version )
  • Sabine Schleiermacher: Reform or Restoration? Suggestions for studying medicine in the American and Soviet zones of occupation. In: Rüdiger vom Bruch, Uta Gerhardt and Aleksandra Pawliczek (eds.): Continuities and discontinuities in the history of science in the 20th century. Steiner, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 247-262. Here: p. 247 (digitized version) ISBN 3-515-08965-9
  • Josef M. Schmidt. Merging with the University of California: History of the Homeopathic College and Hahnemann Hospital in San Francisco. In: Yearbook of the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation. 27 (2008), Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2009, pp. 173-204. Here: pp. 188–190

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ August Bier : How should we approach homeopathy? In: Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift , May 1925
  2. ^ Robert Jütte : Homeopathy and National Socialism - a historical expertise. (As of May 16, 2013). Pp. 11-12
  3. ^ Ernst Otto Guttentag: First Informal Report on Medical Education in Germany April 1948, Rockefeller Archive Center, RF 6.1., Ser. 2.1, box 39, folder 363.
  4. ^ Karl Kötschau: Combative provision instead of charitable welfare. Nuremberg 1939
  5. ^ Karl Kötschau: Prevention or Care? Prelude to a health teaching. Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1954
  6. ^ Otto Ernst Guttentag: The problem of Experimentation on Human Beings. The Physician's Point of View. In: Science , Vol. 117, 1953, pp. 207-210, PMID 13038476 .
personal data
SURNAME Good day, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Guttentag, Otto Ernst (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American medic
DATE OF BIRTH 5th February 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 1992
Place of death Piedmont , Alameda County