Otto Obermeier (doctor)

Otto (Hugo Franz) Obermeier (born February 13, 1843 in Spandau ; † August 20, 1873 ) was a German doctor and bacteriologist . In 1868 he discovered the pathogen causing relapsing fever in the blood of sick people. This is true eight years before the classic work The Etiology of Anthrax Disease by Robert Koch as the first identification of a pathogen in a human infectious disease .

Live and act

Obermeier studied from 1863 at the Humboldt University in Berlin and received his doctorate there in 1866 with the neuroanatomical work De filamentis Purkinianis . He then worked for four years as an assistant at the psychiatric clinic and the hospital ward of Rudolf Virchow at the Charité . He dealt early with epidemiological studies on typhus , cholera and relapsing fever. In 1868, thanks to his in-depth knowledge of microscopic techniques, he discovered the elongated pathogens of relapsing fever in the blood of several sick people. This observation was communicated to the "Berlin Medical Society" at a meeting on February 26, 1873. In the minutes of the meeting it says:

“Before the agenda, Herr Obermeier announced that he had observed thread-like structures with great constancy in the blood of recurrent patients. During the first recurrence epidemic, which ruled Berlin from November 1867 to May 1868, he had already examined the blood of 82 patients, following the direction at that time (...) without discovering anything of the kind. In the last cases, however, he had already noticed peculiar threads between the fibrin clot, and in the end very specific figures, heaps of grains, to which threads ran in the shape of a radius, which were in constant motion. (...)

This year, however, there were several opportunities to take up the matter again. In a relapsed patient, a 17-year-old girl, the very first preparation showed the same structures, very fine threads of different lengths in constant motion between piles of blood cells. (...) At 450 to 500 times magnification, when the blood cells had come to rest and had arranged themselves in the familiar shapes of coin rolls, threads of immeasurably thin, apparently consisting of hyaline plasma, gradually appeared between them , without structure. Where the threads, which were in constant, rising and falling, undulating and spiraling motion crossed, they apparently formed glomeruli by sticking together and then resembled amoebas. "

After this notable success, Obermeier had to leave the Virchow department two years after a cholera epidemic had just broken out, as a ministerial decree meant that no assistant physician was allowed to remain in the same position for more than two years. However, despite his release, he continued the examinations he had begun to detect the cholera pathogen from autopsy material, blood and excretions from cholera patients. However, this now happened under inadequate conditions in his own bedroom and living room. During this research, he was probably infected with the cholera pathogen on August 16. When he noticed the first symptoms of cholera in himself and he was aware of the prognosis, he continued the microscopic examinations unmoved on his own excretions until he was exhausted. He died of this infection on August 20, 1873 at the age of thirty. In 1875, in honor of this genius doctor who died early, Ferdinand Cohn named the causative agent of relapse fever as Spirochaeta obermeieri (later Borrelia obermeieri , now Borrelia recurrentis ).

swell

1. ↑ O. Obermeier: The discovery of thread-like structures in the blood of relapsing fever sufferers (1873). Introduced and reissued by H. Zeiss (Classics of Medicine; Volume 31), Leipzig 1926
2. ↑ quoted from: H. Schott: Medical History (s): Infectious Diseases Relapsing Fever (Borrelia obermeieri) Deutsches Ärzteblatt 101, issue 21 of May 21, 2004, page A-1513

• J. Pagel (ed.): Biographical lexicon of outstanding doctors of the nineteenth century . Berlin 1901
• Stefan Winkle: Cultural history of epidemics . Düsseldorf / Zurich, 1997. page XXVI, 215 and note 150, page 1142