Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases

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Triangle building 1891–1900
Institute for Infectious Diseases
Institute for Infectious Diseases, site map on the north bank (base)
Old isolation ward of the clinical department of the Robert Koch Institute in the Virchow Clinic of the Charité

The Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases was founded in Berlin in 1891 specifically for Robert Koch's research in the new field of bacteriology and clinical infectious diseases .

The institute comprised an experimental department (today the Robert Koch Institute ) and a clinical department (today the medical clinic with a focus on infectiology and pulmonology at the Charité ). Koch thus combined research and patient care in terms of personnel and space. The institute was initially located at the Charité. The so-called triangle, a building with a triangular floor plan in Berlin-Mitte , housed the research laboratories, and there were seven epidemic barracks on the S-Bahn embankment, where today's Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology is located.

Paul Ehrlich and the senior physicians Emil Adolf von Behring and August von Wassermann worked and learned at Koch's institute . Significant advances in the fight against diphtheria and syphilis are associated with their names. Ehrlich and von Behring later also received the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

In 1901 the Institute for Infectious Diseases moved into a new building on the north bank in Berlin-Wedding . Afterwards, at the suggestion of Robert Koch, an infection department was set up in the newly emerging Rudolf Virchow Hospital and opened in 1906. In 1906 the clinic moved to a new building at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital . The medical clinic comprised separate infection wards for men and women, the Reichseuchenhaus for patients with typhus , cholera or smallpox, and temporarily a tuberculosis department. The first director of the clinical department at the location of the Virchow Hospital, Georg Jochmann (1874–1915), was also a member of the RKI and the laboratory and its own section house were operated from there. Jochmann introduced intralumbar serum therapy for rigid neck and wrote a widely used textbook on infectious diseases. He died of typhus at the age of 40.

Ulrich Friedemann (1877–1949) was his successor in 1915 . This dealt with, among other things, scarlet fever , diphtheria , smallpox, as well as colloid chemistry and immunity. The personal union with the RKI continued into the 1930s, when Friedemann, like many Jewish doctors in Berlin , had to emigrate in 1934 because of persecution by the National Socialists . After he emigrated to London, later New York City , the two departments were separated. The experimental department became a Reich authority as the Robert Koch Institute , the clinical department was operated by Prussia and later by the Berlin Senate to protect the population from highly contagious diseases.

In 1954 Felix O. Höring took over the management of the clinical department, in 1968 his student Hans-Dieter Pohle. Ten years later, the largest German special isolation ward for patients with highly contagious diseases ( hemorrhagic fever , smallpox ) was set up for epidemic medical care and pandemic planning in the states of Berlin and Brandenburg . This made the Infection Clinic, alongside the Bernhard Nocht Institute , Hamburg, the second German location for bed isolators, in which, for example, highly infectious hemorrhagic fevers can be treated. In 1990 the first German HIV day clinic was opened.

In 1998 the department was connected to the Charité as a medical clinic with a focus on infectious diseases and pneumology , and Norbert Suttorp was given the first German chair for clinical infectious diseases. Patients with pneumonia, meningitis, diarrhea and tropical diseases are also treated there.

List of senior doctors

Seal of the Institute for Infectious Diseases

Web links

Coordinates: 52 ° 32 ′ 21 ″  N , 13 ° 20 ′ 50 ″  E