Rudolf Otto Neumann

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Rudolf Otto Neumann (born June 29, 1868 in Seifhennersdorf , Saxony , † April 5, 1952 in Hamburg ) was a German hygienist , bacteriologist , virologist and nutritionist . After studying pharmacy and medicine , he worked as a research assistant at various hygienic and bacteriological research institutions in Germany. Habilitated in 1902 , he was appointed professor of hygiene at the University of Giessenwhere he worked until 1914. He then moved to the University of Bonn . He held the chair there until 1922. Until 1937 he was then director of the Hygienic State Institute (today Institute for Hygiene and Environment ) in Hamburg.

Life and research

School time, training and studies

Neumann was born in 1868 about 20 kilometers south of Zittau in a small Saxon town as the son of the cantor and village school teacher Heinrich Neumann. He had one older and two younger brothers and was inspired by his father for the natural sciences and closely observing description from an early age. Since the family's financial circumstances did not allow for a long-term education, he left the grammar school in Zittau after the Obersekunda without a degree. Like his older brother Bernhard before, he completed a pharmaceutical apprenticeship from 1886 , which he completed with an exam in 1889, and worked for several years as a pharmacist's assistant in various cities in Germany and Switzerland. In 1892 (according to other information already in the summer semester of 1890) he finally began studying pharmacy and natural sciences, for which no high school diploma was necessary at that time. After several semesters at the Universities of Greifswald and Leipzig , where he passed his state examination in October 1893, he was in 1894 at the University of Erlangen with the distinction magna cum laude to the Dr. phil. PhD .

In order to get into the scientific world of work after completing his doctorate, Neumann went to Karl Bernhard Lehmann at the University of Würzburg , where he attended a course in bacteriology and from July initially worked as an assistant and from 1895 as assistant to the professor. In the following year, the two published the comprehensive pioneering work “Atlas and Outline of Bacteriology” in two volumes, which went through seven editions and was translated into four languages ​​( French , Spanish , Italian and English ). While the texts came mainly from Lehmann, Rudolf Neumann took over the experiments and drew the extremely detailed illustrations, which for a long time represented one of the unique selling points of the work. In Würzburg, the young pharmacist and bacteriologist became a member of two fraternities . He attended several medical lectures and courses in his spare time; for the state examination, however, the Abitur was necessary, which Neumann made up for during a three-quarter year leave of absence (examination on July 26, 1898). On March 1, 1899, the doctorate in medicine followed. In addition to Würzburg, he also stayed for his medical studies at the Universities of Strasbourg , Berlin and Kiel University .

Scientific activities 1899–1922

Subsequently, from October 1899, he worked for three months as a scientific "unskilled worker" at the pharmacological department of the Imperial Health Department in Berlin , but in January 1900 he switched to the Institute of Hygiene at Kiel University because of the unsatisfactory working conditions for him. After attending further lectures in medicine, the state examination followed in 1902 and, in the same year, on June 7th, the habilitation for the subjects of hygiene and bacteriology. On March 15, 1903 Neumann took a position as head of department at the Hygienic State Institute in Hamburg , but quit after nine months due to differences with the director William Philipps Dunbar and because of dissatisfaction with his authoritarian management style. Shortly afterwards he received the offer to take part in a research trip of the Hamburg Tropical Institute (today Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine ); as a result, he examined from February 1904 for three months in Brazil , the yellow fever (the results he published together with Moritz Otto in 1906). Together with Martin Mayer , head of department at the Tropical Institute, he then started work on the atlas and textbook of important animal parasites and their carriers, with special emphasis on tropical pathology . Here, too, Neumann was responsible for the drawings (in total he created over 1,300 pieces for the work) and his colleague for the text, but since both had various other obligations, the work could not appear until the summer of 1914.

In July 1904 Neumann became an assistant at the Tropical Hygiene Institute in Hamburg and at the seamen's hospital there. As early as January 1905, however, he moved to the Hygiene Institute of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , where the nostrification took place on May 6th and he was appointed associate professor on June 12th, 1906. In March and April 1908 he was doing research at the Naples Zoological Station . On December 29, 1909, he received a call to the full chair for hygiene at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen , which he accepted in the summer semester of the following year. The directorate of the Giessen Hygiene Institute went hand in hand with this professorship. Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Order of the White Elephant 4th class by his former student, the Thai Prince Rangsit Prayurasakdi , and invited to come to Bangkok as head of the Thai health system . He refused, but maintained friendly contact with the prince throughout his life and received a visit from him in 1938. From 1912 he was there in particular with rabies infections . In the summer semester of 1914 he went to the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn as a full professor and director of the Hygiene Institute there . From there he went on a research trip to East Africa, which had to be ended early because of the outbreak of war, and was deployed as a war effort for hygiene in Allenstein .

Director at the Hamburg Hygiene Institute and later years

In the winter semester of 1922/1923, Rudolf Otto Neumann switched to the management of the Hygiene Institute Hamburg and the associated chair for hygiene, in which he had already worked briefly in 1903, as the successor to the late William Philipps Dunbar (* 1863; † 1922). At first he feared that the relative youth of the university there (founded in 1919) could be detrimental to his scientific reputation and that the dual function as university professor and director of an independent institute would mean too high a workload, but ultimately he was convinced by the good financial and technical resources. In August 1923 he became a member of the Reich Health Council . On April 26, 1933, he joined the NSDAP , which had previously been rather apolitical, and in November 1933 signed the confession of the German professors to Adolf Hitler . In the same year he was appointed a member of the Imperial Leopoldine Carolinian Academy in Halle an der Saale on November 17th and received his admissions diploma on November 22nd.

On January 21, 1935, the law on the dismissal and transfer of university lecturers was enacted on the occasion of the reorganization of the German higher education system, from which Neumann was supposed to be dismissed because he had already reached the age of 65. However, no suitable successor was found, so that he retired on September 30th, but initially continued his tasks in self-advocacy. In April 1935 he joined the National Socialist Teachers' Association and the Reich Association of German Civil Servants . In 1937 he received the Mayor Stolten Medal of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. In the same year Neumann ended his activity at the Hygiene Institute; At his request and after long negotiations with the authorities that were initially negative, his successor was the hygienist Karl Süpfle, who teaches in Munich . When he was drafted into the army during the Second World War to serve as a hygienic advisor at the front, he acted as acting representative until April 1940; then Otfrid Ehrismann and Walter Gaehtgens took over this position. He lectured regularly until the summer semester of 1943 and continued to support the institute. In 1943 Horst Habs finally came to Hamburg as director, in the same year Rudolf Otto Neumann received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science .

As part of denazification , Neumann was classified in Group IV in 1945, that is, as a “ fellow traveler ”; in an appeal procedure in 1948, he was reassessed and classified as Group V (“unencumbered”). On 20 June 1951, the newly purchased was launch of the Hygiene Institute for scientific research in the water and to study the quality of the same water in the name of Rudolf Otto Neumann baptized. Neumann died the following year.

Personality, research and private matters

Despite his initially very limited financial possibilities, Rudolf Otto Neumann was a very ambitious personality and usually had no easy relationship with his superiors. He devoted all his energy to his scientific work and carried it out with discipline and commitment, especially as the institute director. He demanded the same from his employees, so that he was perceived as strict and aloof. Politically, Neumann was nationally conservative and cultivated a rejection of social democracy and communism on the one hand, and massive anti-Semitism on the other. During the Third Reich he was a member of the NSDAP, but apparently without holding any party office. According to his statement after the World War, he was not a staunch supporter of the ideology prescribed by the state. His diary entries, which were later revised, show on the one hand a massive rejection of some National Socialist innovations in the state and society, on the other hand (especially in retrospect) a glorification of the politics of the Third Reich. After 1945 he supported the German right-wing party .

Neumann had a very broad conception of his area of ​​expertise and, in addition to hygiene in the narrower sense, also included other relationships between humans and their environment in an interdisciplinary approach. Since he was at school, he had been working with great dedication to build up his private collection on hygienic topics, which he handed over to the institute in 1935 and which eventually contained over 15,000 objects, but only partially survived after his death. Neumann dealt with parasites and people's daily nutritional needs in some self- experiments . In 1902, as a result of the latter, he published a comprehensive study of the daily required amount of nutrients, especially proteins. He later also examined the effects of a diet under war conditions, testing various bread substitutes, alcohols, cocoa and a diet consisting exclusively of soybeans , among other things . For these activities in the service of the war economy , he was awarded the title of Privy Medical Councilor in 1917 . In total, he published more than 125 scientific papers. Through radio lectures and exhibitions, he tried to bring the activities of the institute he headed to a wider public.

Rudolf Otto Neumann was a Protestant denomination. During his stay as an assistant in Kiel (1900-1903) he met Elisabeth Minna Dorothea Krützfeldt († 1961), who became his partner and also appeared as his companion on official occasions. Nonetheless, the two did not get married until 1931, for tax reasons. Both undertook several trips alone (Neumann mostly for reasons of economy as a ship's doctor), only one longer joint venture to the world exhibition in Chicago took place in 1933. Rudolf and Elisabeth Neumann campaigned for animal welfare and established the Hamburg Animal Welfare Association from 1841 as an inheritance. In Hamburg, the two initially lived in their official apartment on the institute's premises in Jungiusstrasse, and in 1934 they moved into a villa from the Wilhelminian era in 193 Rothenbaumchaussee.

Fonts (selection)

Scientific publications

  • with Karl Bernhard Lehmann : Atlas and outline of bacteriology and textbook of special bacteriological diagnostics. 2 volumes, Lehmann, Munich 1896; 7th edition 1926/1927.
  • with Hans Erich Moritz Otto: Studies on yellow fever in Brazil during the yellow fever expedition carried out at the instigation of the Institute for Ship and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg in the summer of 1904. Veit & Comp., Leipzig 1906.
  • with Martin Mayer : Atlas and textbook of important animal parasites and their vectors. With special consideration of tropical pathology. Lehmann, Munich 1914.
  • The breads, bread substitutes and bread extenders used and recommended for use in the war of 1914–1918 based on our own experimental investigations. At the same time a representation of the bread examination and the modern bread question. Julius Springer, Berlin 1920.

Posthumously edited diary excerpts

  • Rudolf Otto Neumann: Travel to Egypt via Switzerland and Italy and study visit to Cairo March 14, 1909 - May 5, 1909. Edited and commented on by Felix Brahm (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 1). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-080-X .
  • Romy Steinmeier (Ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So Dagmar Drüll: Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon 1803-1932. Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 1986, ISBN 3-540-15856-1 , p. 192. In 1892 Romy Steinmeier (ed.) Wrote : “But Hamburg also had its good sides”. Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , p. 18.
  2. ^ Holm-Jürgen Schwarz:  Neumann, Rudolf Otto. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 136 f. ( Digitized version ).
  3. ↑ Romy Steinmeier (ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , p. 45.
  4. ^ Walter Bruchhausen: Hygiene and Public Health in Bonn from the 18th to the 20th century . In: Walter Bruchhausen and Thomas Kistemann (eds.): 125 years of the Institute for Hygiene and Public Health at the University of Bonn . Bonn 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-062603-6 , pp. 7-56 .
  5. ↑ Romy Steinmeier (ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , pp. 28-30.
  6. ↑ Romy Steinmeier (ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , p. 21 f.
  7. ↑ On Neumann's political position, Romy Steinmeier (ed.): “Hamburg also had its good sides”. Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , p. 215, p. 220 and passim.
  8. ↑ Romy Steinmeier (ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , pp. 23 and 39.
  9. ↑ Rudolf Otto Neumann: Experimental contributions to the theory of the daily food requirement of humans, with special consideration of the necessary amounts of protein. In: Archives for Hygiene and Bacteriology. Volume 42, 1902, pp. 1-90.
  10. ^ Karl Süpfle : Rudolf Otto Neumann on his 70th birthday. In: German Medical Weekly . Volume 64, 1938, issue 26, p. 941 f., Here p. 941.
  11. ↑ Romy Steinmeier (ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , p. 38, note 22 and p. 40–43.
  12. ↑ Romy Steinmeier (ed.): "But Hamburg also had its good sides". Rudolf Otto Neumann and the Hygiene Institute Hamburg (= series of publications by the Institute for Hygiene and Environment, Hamburg. Volume 3). Edition Temmen, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-86108-083-4 , p. 59 and p. 69.
personal data
SURNAME Neumann, Rudolf Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German hygienist and bacteriologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Seifhennersdorf
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 1952
Place of death Hamburg