Carl Prausnitz

Otto Carl Willy Prausnitz , also known as Carl Prausnitz-Giles, (born October 11, 1876 in Hamburg ; died April 21, 1963 in Ventnor , Isle of Wight ) was a German hygienist. He was best known as a co-discoverer of the Prausnitz-Küstner reaction .

Life and activity

Prausnitz was a son of Otto Prausnitz and his British wife Edith Maria Giles. After attending the Johanneum High School in Hamburg , where he passed the humanistic examination at Easter 1894, he studied mathematics and physics for two semesters at the Technical University in Darmstadt.

In 1896 Prausnitz turned to medicine. He studied this subject at the universities of Leipzig , Kiel and Breslau . At Easter 1898 he passed the Tentamen physicum in Leipzig and in the winter of 1900/1901 the state medical examination in Breslau. He then worked for a year as an assistant doctor at the Freemason Hospital in Hamburg. From April 1902, Prausnitz worked as an intern at the Hygienic and Pathological Institute there and was employed there as an assistant in December 1902. In 1903 he received his doctorate at the University of Breslau.

In 1905 Prausnitz went to Great Britain, where he was appointed demonstrator for bacteriology at the Royal Institute of Public Health in London. From 1908 to 1910 Prausnitz was an assistant at the bacteriological laboratory of the London Metropolitan Asylum Board.

Since 1910, Prausnitz headed the anger protection department (rabies protection) of the Hygiene Institute at the University of Breslau. In 1912 he qualified as a professor for bacteriology and hygiene and from 1918 to 1920 was the director of the local investigation office. In 1920 he was appointed head of the East German Social Hygiene Academy in Breslau.

From 1923 to 1926 Prausnitz was deputy director of the Hygiene Institute at the University of Greifswald . In 1926 he accepted a position as professor and head of the Hygiene Institute at the University of Breslau. In addition to his university activities, he was also a member of the standardization commission for Sera at the hygiene committee of the League of Nations.

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Prausnitz was dismissed from civil service because of his Jewish origin according to the National Socialist definition. He then went to Great Britain, where he taught at the University of Manchester until 1935 . He was naturalized in Great Britain in 1939 and at that time added his mother's maiden name to his surname, henceforth calling himself Prausnitz-Giles . He then worked as a general practitioner on the Isle of Wight until his death in 1963.

After his emigration, the police of the Nazi state classified Prausnitz as an enemy of the state: in the spring of 1940 he was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Security Main Office , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos following the occupation troops should move into the country, should be located and arrested with special priority.

The focus of Prausnitz's work was in the fields of bacteriology and immunology. He worked on cholera , hay fever and the standardization of sera.

Prausnitz is best known for the development of the Prausnitz-Küstner reaction: In 1921 Prausnitz and his assistant Heinz Küstner demonstrated that there was a connection between the allergic reaction of an allergic person and his or her blood. In a self-experiment, Küstner, a person allergic to fish, injected a small amount of blood intracutaneously into healthy Prausnitz, whereupon Prausnitz (like Küstner) also reacted in an allergic manner to fish dishes. This showed that allergic reactivity is transmitted together with the proteins in the blood serum. As a test method for diagnosing allergic diseases, the two of them then developed the Prausnitz-Küstner reaction, which remained pioneering for years. In the meantime, however, the procedure has fallen out of use due to the high risk of infection.

family

Since 1903, Prausnitz was married to Margo Brück, the daughter of the professor for criminal procedure law in Breslau. With her he had two sons, including Otto Prausnitz (1904-1980), who became a lawyer and after 1933 did research at the London School of Economics and at Reading University, and a daughter, Anna, who was married to the criminal lawyer Arthur Wegner .

Prausnitz's brother-in-law, his wife's brother, was Eberhard Friedrich Bruck , professor of Roman and civil law in Geneva, Frankfurt and Bonn, and later at Harvard.

Fonts

• On the current status of the cholera diagnosis with special consideration of those vibrions which are difficult to distinguish from cholera vibrio , 1903.
• Basic hygiene. Taking into account the legislation of the German Reich and Austria , 1923. (with W. Prausnitz)
• Health organization: Permanent commission on standardization of sera, serological reactions and biological products. Memoranda on the international standardization of therapeutic sera and bacterial products , 1929.
• Bacteriological paperback. The most important techn. Regulations z. bacteriological laboratory work , 1931. (with O. Olsen)
• "Medical training in Germany, France and Great Britain in the light of efforts to reform medical studies", in: DMW, 58 (1932), 1534.
• The Teaching of preventive Medicine in Europe , 1933.
• Investigations on Respiratory Dust Disease in Operatives in the Cotton Industry , 1936.

literature

• Werner E. Gerabek: "Prausnitz, Otto Carl Willy" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie , Vol. 20 (2001), p. 679 f.
• Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 301.
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 924.
• HD Göring: "The passive transmission of soft type allergy in self-experiment by Carl Prausnitz and Heinz Küstner - a milestone in allergy research", in: Akt Dermatol, Vol. 33, 2007, pp. 87-91.
• Davod W. Hide "Carl Prausnitz - Father of Clinical Allergy", in: Southampton Medical Journal , vol. 8, r. 2 (October 1992).
• Obituary in International Archives of Allergy and Applied Immunology, Vol. 23, 1963, p. 281.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Prausnitz on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).