Rudolf Buchheim

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Rudolf Buchheim.

Rudolf Richard Buchheim (born March 1, 1820 in Budissin (today Bautzen ), † December 25, 1879 in Gießen ) was a German physician and experimental pharmacologist . Together with his student Oswald Schmiedeberg , he founded pharmacology as an independent medical-biological subject.

Life

Buchheim's father was a doctor. Rudolf studied medicine at the Medical and Surgical Academy in Dresden and Leipzig , among other things as a student of Ernst Heinrich Weber . The Leipzig professor of physiological chemistry Karl Gotthelf Lehmann (1812–1863) awakened Buchheim's lifelong interest in the chemical aspects of medicine. In 1845 he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD . Orphaned and poor at an early age, he earned his living as a medical writer. So he translated into German (and edited at the same time) the work of the British doctor and professor of materia medica Jonathan Pereira (1804-1853) The Elements of Materia medica and Therapeutics . The translation appeared in two volumes in 1846 (844 pages) and 1848 (929 pages). Oswald Schmiedeberg wrote in his tribute to Buchheim: “The time that Buchheim devoted to this processing ... can be regarded as his apprenticeship in pharmacological and other relevant areas. He had no other teacher than himself in these fields. ”His literary work made Buchheim so well known that in 1847, two years after his doctorate, he became an associate professor, then in 1849 a full professor of pharmacology, dietetics and history and encyclopedia of medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Dorpat .

Dorpat, today's Tartu , was part of Russia at the time, but the university was German-speaking. It flourished: In Buchheim's time, the biochemist Carl Schmidt , who discovered hydrochloric acid in gastric juice, the anatomist and physiologist Friedrich Heinrich Bidder , the pharmacist Georg Dragendorff and the anatomist Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer , named after the Kupffer stellate cells in the liver, worked here. Shortly after Buchheim, the physiologist Hermann Adolf Alexander Schmidt (1831-1894), who discovered thrombin , and the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin worked in Dorpat . Buchheim set up a pharmacological laboratory in Dorpat in the basement of his house and with his own money. In 1860 the faculty replaced it with a spacious new pharmacological institute in the Theatrum Anatomicum .

Buchheim's house in Dorpat, destroyed in the Second World War
Theatrum Anatomicum in Dorpat with the Pharmacological Institute, today's condition

Schmiedeberg: “Buchheim is the founder of the first pharmacological institute, which remained almost the only one of its kind for two decades, since there were essentially only 'pharmacognostic collections' at other universities, but not institutes for experimental pharmacological work. ... It was on this favorable ground that Buchheim's activity developed, which led to a pharmacology on an experimental basis. ”Buchheim carried out his experiments with doctoral students, 90 during his time in Dorpater. Some of the dissertations were still written in Latin, and their level was relatively high. Schmiedeberg gives a list with short summaries, including his own dissertation from 1866 on the quantitative determination of chloroform in blood and its behavior towards it . In the years 1853 to 1856 the first edition of Buchheim's textbook on drug theory appeared . At first he wanted to call it the draft of a scientific drug theory , aware that, as it was said in a review, “the more recent, exact research method and a logically disciplined way of thinking has only led us to the first degree of knowledge, namely ignorance”.

Buchheim was dean of the Dorpater medical faculty twice for three years. In 1863 he turned down a call to the University of Breslau . In 1866 he received calls to Giessen and Bonn at the same time . He accepted the call to Giessen. There, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse , he promised better promotion of pharmacology than in Prussian Breslau and Bonn. However, he first had to set up a laboratory in his own house in Giessen. He only had a few PhD students here. He died in 1879 while the planning of a new institute was coming to an end. His grave in the old cemetery in Giessen has been preserved.

Grave of Rudolf Buchheim and his wife Minna in the old cemetery in Giessen

The genesis of pharmacology

According to the original title, Pereira's book dealt with the materia medica , and Buchheim's Dorpater chair was devoted to medicine, among other things. At that time one meant the collective knowledge about the properties and the therapeutic application of any kind of substances. The compendia described in detail medicinal plants, drugs and minerals. The supposed knowledge about the therapeutic use was often only guesswork. At best it was based on observations made on patients without control attempts, and often only on a dogma such as the doctrine of signatures . The fact that there must be a physical-chemical-biological interaction between a substance and the living being hardly existed as a thought, let alone as an explicit theory.

There were also experiments before Buchheim with the aim of identifying such an interaction for individual substances. Two French people in particular showed the way: François Magendie , who found out, for example, that the spasmodic effect of strychnine was found in the spinal cord, and Claude Bernard , who found out, for example, that curare paralyzes through an effect on the motor endplate .

Magendie and Bernard saw themselves as physiologists, striving to understand the normal functioning of the body, and used pharmaceuticals, whether drugs or poisons, only as an aid to this end. Buchheim's and later Schmiedeberg's goal was to understand the physical, chemical and biological interaction of all drugs and poisons with living beings - to understand them as chains of causes and effects - and to make this understanding usable for humans. That was a goal of its own and of a new kind, and the research to achieve it has since formed the subject of pharmacology. Buchheim already formulated the two directions of interaction in the foreword of his work on Pereira: “Two questions immediately stand in our way, namely 1) to what extent are the drugs changed by the organism and 2) to what extent do they have a changing effect on the organism. “ The two directions are now called pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics .

Buchheim created pharmacology as a subject sui generis . Schmiedeberg already judged Buchheim's own research: “(The results contain) no major discoveries, although they significantly expand our knowledge in numerous areas and, in particular, formed an important basis for further research and still do so now. The main importance of this work, however, is that it introduced experimental research into this important branch of medicine and gradually became naturalized in it. ”A lasting result comes from Krich's dissertation in 1857, Experimenta quaedam pharmacologicae de oleis Ricini, Crotonis et Euphorbiae Lathyridis (Some pharmacological experiments on castor oil , croton oil and cruciferous milkweed oil ): What is laxative in the case of oils is the free acids formed in the intestine from the triglycerides , in the case of castor oil ricinoleic acid .

Pharmacology in Dorpat after Buchheim

When Buchheim went to Giessen in 1867, his former doctoral student Schmiedeberg became his successor and stayed until he was called to Strasbourg in 1872. List of the first successors of Buchheim in Dorpat:

Surname Lifetime Years in Dorpat Coming from Dorpat Alternating from Dorpat
Oswald Schmiedeberg 1838-1921 1867-1872 (was already in Dorpat) Strasbourg
Rudolf Boehm 1844-1926 1872-1882 Wurzburg Marburg
Hans Horst Meyer 1853-1939 1882-1884 Strasbourg Marburg
Valerian Podwyssotzky 1884-1885 (was already in Dorpat) Kazan
Rudolf Kobert 1854-1918 1886-1896 Strasbourg Rostock
Stanislaw Czirwinsky 1852-1922 1897-1902 Strasbourg Moscow
David Lavrov 1865-1929 1902-1918 St. Petersburg Voronezh , Odessa
Paul Trendelenburg 1884-1931 1918 Freiburg in Breisgau Rostock
Siegfried Walter Loewe 1884-1963 1921-1928 Goettingen Mannheim
Georg Barkan 1889-1945 1929-1937 Frankfurt / M. Boston

In Kobert's time, not only 13 volumes of a series of papers from the Pharmacological Institute on Dorpat appeared , but also 5 volumes of a series of historical studies from the Pharmacological Institute of the Imperial University of Dorpat (1889-1896). During these years, the Russification of the Baltic States was promoted. The working language at the university became Russian. The professors either had to give the lectures in Russian or leave. Kobert, although Imperial Councilor of State, left Dorpat in 1896.

The university shared the fortunes of their country. There was also a “Russian interlude” at the Pharmacological Institute with Professors Czirwinsky and Lavrov. In February 1918, Estonia proclaimed its independence. In April 1918, the State University of Dorpat was founded by the German side. Paul Trendelenburg was appointed to the Pharmacological Institute in 1918 , but in the same year he went to Rostock as Kobert's successor. The university became - now under the name University of Tartu - Estonian National University with Estonian as the working language. The Pharmacological Institute continues in it, the same one that Buchheim had moved into in 1859 at the Theatrum Anatomicum . In 1970 an international conference dedicated to Buchheim's 150th birthday took place there.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Buchheim: Jonathan Pereira's Handbook of the Doctrine of Medicinal Products. First and second volume. Voss, Leipzig 1846 and 1848.
  2. ↑ a b c O. Schmiedeberg: Rudolf Buchheim, his life and its importance for the establishment of scientific drug theory and pharmacology. In: Archives of Experimental Pathology and Pharmacology . 67, 1912, pp. 1-54.
  3. ↑ S. Loewe: From the cradle of pharmacology. In: Archives of Experimental Pathology and Pharmacology. 104, 1924, pp. 1-5.
  4. ↑ a b L. Nurmand: On the history of pharmacology at the University of Tartu (Dorpat). In: DGPT-Mitteilungen. No. 19, 1996, pp. 58-63.
  5. ↑ Rudolf Buchheim: Textbook of drug theory. Voss, Leipzig 1853-1856.
  6. ↑ B. Holmstedt and G. Liljestrand: Readings in Pharmacology . New York, MacMillan 1963.
  7. ↑ John Parascansdola: Reflections on the history of pharmacology. In: Trends in Pharmacological Sciences . 3, 1982, pp. 93-94.
  8. ^ E. Muscholl: The evolution of experimental pharmacology as a biological science. The pioneering work of Buchheim and Schmiedeberg. In: British Journal of Pharmacology . 116, 1995, pp. 2155-2159.
  9. ^ Klaus Starke : A history of Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology . In: Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology. 358, 1998, pp. 1-109.
  10. ↑ Klaus Aktories , Ulrich Förstermann, Franz Hofmann and Klaus Starke: General and special pharmacology and toxicology. 10th edition. Elsevier, Munich 2009, here p. 1.
  11. ↑ Leo Nurmand: Pharmacological Laboratory and Institute of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tartu (Tartu). In: Athineos Philippu (Ed.): History and work of the pharmacological, clinical-pharmacological and toxicological institutes in German-speaking countries. Berenkamp, ​​Innsbruck 2004, pp. 151–159

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Buchheim, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Buchheim, Rudolf Richard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physician and pharmacologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1820
PLACE OF BIRTH Budissin (Bautzen)
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1879
Place of death to water