Robert Wesselhöft

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Robert Wesselhöft (born February 13, 1796 in Chemnitz , † November 18, 1852 in Reudnitz near Leipzig ) was a German fraternity and doctor .

Life

The son of the printer, Johann Karl Wesselhöft, studied law in Jena from 1815 . Appointed member of the board of the Jena Burschenschaft in 1817 , he invited to the Wartburg Festival on their behalf . As the successor to Heinrich Riemann , he became the head of the Jena fraternity . In 1820 he was speaker of the Boys' Day in Dresden.

After the dissolution of the fraternities forced by the Karlovy Vary resolutions , his career at the university was interrupted. He lost a brief job in Weida due to Prussian pressure.

In 1821 he joined the Youth Union and in 1822 became its chairman. After the youth league was betrayed by Johannes Andreas Dietz on August 31, 1823, he initially hid himself as a fisherman in Erfurt . There he was arrested on January 13, 1824. He was held in solitary confinement in Köpenick and, from 1826, in the Magdeburg casemates. It was not until 1828 that he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in a fortress in Breslau . In 1831 he was released through an amnesty .

He then published various writings on the subject of fraternities. Heinrich Heine wrote the introduction to his work Kahldorf on the nobility in 1831. In 1840 he emigrated to the United States . There he practiced as a doctor in Cambridge (Massachusetts) . There he also became acquainted with the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne . Since Wesselhöft was considered a supporter of homeopathic and hydrotherapeutic healing methods, he was violently attacked by the doctor and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1842; In 1843 the University of Basel earned him a doctorate in medicine in absentia. The Wesselhöft family left Massachusetts in 1845 and moved to Vermont . Together with his brother Wilhelm Wesselhöft, who had emigrated in 1824, he founded an institute for hydrotherapy in Brattleboro (Vermont).

He returned to Germany seriously ill in 1852 and died in the same year. He left behind his wife and a daughter Minna.

Hawthorne is said to have dealt with the conflict between Wesselhöft and Wendell Holmes in the short story " Rappaccini's Daughter ", which appeared in 1844.

Fonts

  • Carl Ludwig Sand, represented through his diaries and letters from some of his friends. 1821 together with August von Binzer (1793 to 1868).
  • German youth in former times fraternities and gymnastics communities. Heavily censored in 1828.
  • Kahldorf about the nobility in letters to Count M. von Moltke. Hoffmann et al. Campe, Nuremberg 1831, published by Heinrich Heine. Digitized
  • Some Remarks on Dr. OW Holmes Lectures on Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions; Communicated to a Friend , Boston, 1842

literature

  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Volume 6: T-Z. Winter, Heidelberg 2005, ISBN 3-8253-5063-0 , pp. 276-280.
  • Peter Kaupp (edit.): Stamm-Buch of the Jenaische Burschenschaft. The members of the original fraternity 1815-1819 (= treatises on student and higher education. Vol. 14). SH-Verlag, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-89498-156-3 , pp. 55-56.
  • James S. Breast: The Wesselhoeft Watercure ; in: Aceso: vol. 4, no. 1 (autumn 2016), pp. 32–36

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Augspurgische Ordinari postal newspaper . No. 274 of November 15, 1824, p. 3.
  2. ↑ Heinrich Heine: Introduction to "Kahldorf on the Nobility"
personal data
SURNAME Wesselhöft, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German fraternity and doctor
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1796
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1852
Place of death Reudnitz near Leipzig