Paul Julius Möbius

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Paul Julius Möbius

Paul Julius Möbius or Moebius (born January 24, 1853 in Leipzig ; † January 8, 1907 there ) was a German neurologist , psychiatrist and science journalist.

Life

Möbius was a son of the educator Paul Möbius and a grandson of the astronomer and mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius ; the botanist Martin Möbius was his younger brother. After attending the Thomas School in Leipzig, he studied theology and philosophy from 1870 and from 1873 also medicine in Leipzig, Jena and Marburg . He received his doctorate as Dr. phil. (1873) and Dr. med. (1877).

In 1878 he first settled privately as a neurologist and electrotherapist in Leipzig. At the same time he worked from 1882 as a volunteer and from 1883 as a regular assistant at the nerve department of the Medical Polyclinic of the University of Leipzig under Wilhelm Erb and Adolf von Strümpell .

In 1883 he completed his habilitation and thus acquired the license to teach at Leipzig University. After Möbius had been overlooked several times in the appointment of professors and the directorate of the Medical Polyclinic, he gave back his habilitation in 1893 under loud protest and limited himself to his private practice.

From 1886 he published the "Schmidtsche Jahrbücher für die Entire Medicin" and thus rose to become one of the most influential critics in the medical press.

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His work on the psychogenesis of mental and nervous diseases, including hysteria, is still important today and of scientific historical value . In it he postulated for the first time psychological causes of an illness in the German-speaking area. Because of this and because he convincingly highlighted the suggestive healing effects of electrotherapy , Sigmund Freud described Möbius as one of the fathers of psychotherapy .

Another lasting merit is to have given his friend and temporary colleague at the Leipzig Psychiatric and Nervous Clinic, the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin , important suggestions for the differentiation and systematization of mental illnesses. Möbius had made a classification of nervous and mental illnesses based solely on the causes of illness assumed by Kraepelins. Its division into endogenous and exogenous disorders was preserved for a long time and had a pioneering effect on psychiatry and neurology in the 20th century. However, he reduced endogenous disorders, i.e. those caused in the nervous system itself, to the effects of degenerative degeneration .

In addition, Möbius syndrome bears his name, which he first described in 1888, and he paved the way for identifying the endocrinological cause of Graves' disease .

He also described in detail the migraine ophthalmoplégique ("eye migraine"), a symptom of migraine also known as Möbius' disease , which precedes the headache as a so-called aura and from which Möbius also suffered.

Möbius gained dubious fame with his pamphlet " On the physiological nonsense of women " (Halle: Marhold 1900). The core message of the work not only postulates this “nonsense of women”, but also tries to substantiate it with methods that were already dubious at the time. In addition, he claims that nonsense is a positive quality that serves to preserve the species of man and therefore inevitably results from the evolution of man. Möbius received a lot of applause, but also provoked counter-writings with this font, such as The Antifeminists (1902) by Hedwig Dohm . As a further answer to Möbius, the work The Woman and Intellectualism by Oda Olberg appeared in 1902 and the work Feminism and Science by Johanna Elberskirchen in 1903 . Elberskirchen judged: "The fact is that the scholars are too much man in their judgment of women and too little or not at all scientifically judging people." In other writings (such as gender and head size ) Möbius tried to underpin his theses - and thus proved at the same time in notes his misunderstanding of brain anatomy and brain physiology. “About the physiological nonsense of women” was published eight times during his lifetime; Möbius included letters in the later editions that he had received for and against the book from women and men. These letters ended up making up almost half of the book.

In Joshua Sobol's play Weininger Nacht , Moebius appears as the persecutor of the philosopher Otto Weininger , whom he accuses of plagiarism .

Fonts (selection)

Title page of the first print
  • The nervousness. Leipzig 1885.
  • Comments on simulation in accident nervous patients. In: Munich Medical Weekly. Volume 37, 1890, pp. 887 f.
  • About the concept of hysteria and other allegations, mainly of a psychological nature. In: Neurological contributions A. Abel (Arthur Meiner), Leipzig 1894 - Möbius, Paul Julius (1894) in Wikiversity
  • The circumscribed facial atrophy. Alfred Hölder, Vienna, 1895.
  • About the pathological in Goethe. JA Barth, Leipzig 1898 - Möbius, Paul Julius (1898) in the Wikiversity
  • About Schopenhauer. With 12 portraits. Barth, Leipzig 1899 - Möbius, Paul Julius (1899) in Wikiversity
  • About degeneration. Bergmann, Wiesbaden, 1900.
  • About the physiological nonsense of women . Treatise. Published by Carl Marhold, Halle a. S., 5th revised edition 1903 first printing 1900, 9th edition 1908 ( title page )
  • About Robert Schumann's illness , Halle / Saale 1906
  • Goethe and the sexes . Reprint, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Schutterwald / Baden 1999, ISBN 978-3-928640-42-8
  • The pathological in Goethe . Reprint, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Schutterwald / Baden 1999, ISBN 978-3-928640-48-0
  • JJ Rousseau's youth . Reprint, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Schutterwald / Baden 1999, ISBN 978-3-928640-46-6
  • Nietzsche. Disease and philosophy . Reprint, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Schutterwald / Baden 2000, ISBN 978-3-928640-67-1
  • About the facility for mathematics . Barth, Leipzig 1900

literature

  • Holger Steinberg: “As if I were speaking to a stone wall.” The neurologist Paul Julius Möbius. A work biography. Huber, Bern a. a. 2005, ISBN 3-456-84175-2 (Habilitation thesis Universität Leipzig 2005, 339 pages).
  • Holger Steinberg: On the 150th birthday of the Leipzig neurologist, psychiatrist and medical writer Paul Julius Möbius. In: Der Nervenarzt 75, 2004, ISSN  0028-2804 , pp. 97-100, doi: 10.1007 / s00115-003-1569-3 .
  • Heinz-Jürgen Voss : Making Sex Revisited. Deconstruction of gender from a biological-medical perspective . Transcript, Bielefeld 2010, ISBN 978-3-8376-1329-2 (Dissertation University of Bremen 2009, 469 pages).
  • Elisabeth Katharina Waldeck-Semadeni: Paul Julius Moebius, 1853-1907: Life and Work. Bern 1980, OCLC 12717034 (dissertation University of Bern 1980, 222 pages).

Web links

Wikisource: Paul Julius Möbius  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Paul Julius Möbius  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Holger Steinberg: Psychiatry at the University of Leipzig: A two hundred year tradition. In: Würzburger medical history reports 23, 2004, pp. 270–312; here: p. 286.
  2. ^ Johanna Elberskirchen: Feminism and Science , 1903, p. 4
personal data
SURNAME Möbius, Paul Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neurologist, university professor, author
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1853
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1907
Place of death Leipzig