Siegmund Auerbach

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Portrait of Siegmund Auerbach around 1912

Siegmund Auerbach (born April 29, 1866 in Nordhausen ( Thuringia ); died July 11, 1923 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German neurologist .

Life

Siegmund Auerbach was a son of the married couple Clara and Samuel Auerbach. Samuel Auerbach worked as a rabbi in Elberfeld . Auerbach was a brother-in-law of Ludwig Edinger . After studying medicine  in Marburg , Würzburg , Munich , Berlin  and Vienna, he received his license to practice medicine in 1890 . He did  his doctorate with Otto von Bollinger in Munich.

From 1890 to 1892 he was assistant to Ludwig Rehn . In 1892 he became a doctor. In 1895 he married Clara Goldschmidt, whose sister Anna became the wife of the doctor Ludwig Edinger . The marriage with Clara Goldschmidt resulted in two daughters, Emma Gertrud, born in 1895, who later married the lawyer Robert Marx , and Lotti Helene, born in 1900, later married Sternau. Ludwig Edinger moved Auerbach to specialize in neurology  .

Auerbach passed the Prussian medical exam and became a medical adviser in 1907 . Among other things, he was a headache expert and called for a Reich law against damage to health caused by noise.

In Frankfurt, where he worked as a resident doctor, he became head of the polyclinic for mentally ill patients in 1912 . In the same year he visited the USA for the first time to participate in the Congress on Hygiene and Demography in Washington, DC ; he traveled with the Cincinnati from Hamburg .

In the New York Times of October 27, 1912, an article with several columns appeared under the heading German neurologist tells why we are so nervous ; In it, Auerbach is described as a “keen-eyed, energetic man of middle ages” who immediately pounced on his topic: In addition to the noise, especially in America, the poor and unsanitary condition of the streets and the inadequate ventilation in the hotels are harmful to health criticized, as well as the open garbage trucks and the rattling railways and elevated railways. He also wanted to have established that there were more neurasthenics in his host country than in Germany, where the experiment had just begun to treat them separately from other patients in sanatoriums, after which they would quickly be able to work again. Returning to his specialty, noise, he evidently developed suggestions for the reporters to make a hotel stay more pleasant. Apart from lightproof curtains or shutters, adequate ventilation and sealing off sources of noise such as music rooms, he advocated a black list on which naughty and noisy guests should be listed, who should then no longer be accepted in any hotel. Finally, he touched on a topic in front of the newspaper, the public discussion of which was still taboo in the USA at the time , and declared that venereal diseases could never be completely eradicated by means such as Salvarsan ; Prevention is the method of choice.

Auerbach allegedly dissected the brains of five great musicians of his time and found deviations from the norm.

Auerbach's first wife died in 1916. He is said to have married again in 1922 or 1923. According to the Heilbronn City Archives, the second wife was Hannchen Lissmann or Lißmann, who ran a hat shop in Heilbronn's Kaiserstraße . According to a family chronicle, it was Hannchen Hermine Barasch, b. Lissmann, daughter of Hermann Lissmann and Julie Kallmann, who was born in Koblenz in 1874 and died in Frankfurt in 1932.

In the exhibition 36 donors for an idea of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main 2014, one station is dedicated to Siegmund Auerbach.

literature

  • Alma Kreuter, German-speaking neurologist and psychiatrist. A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the forerunners to the middle of the 20th century , Volume 1, de Gruyter 1995, ISBN 978-3-598-11196-9 , pp. 54–56
  • Renate Heuer , Siegbert Wolf (ed.): The Jews of the Frankfurt University . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-593-35502-7 , p. 22nd f .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ William Sternau on db.yadvashem.org
  2. ↑ Lotti Sternau on db.yadvashem.org
  3. ^ Günter Bayerl, Norman Fuchsloch, Torsten Meyer (eds.), Environmental History. Methods, topics, potentials Waxmann Verlag 1996 (= Cottbus studies on the history of technology, work and the environment, Volume 1) ISBN 978-3-89325-448-4 , p. 211 with note 55
  4. ↑ Extract from the passenger list at www.ellisisland.org
  5. ^ German neurologist tells why we are so nervous , in: New York Times, October 27, 1912
  6. ↑ Does music training change the brain? , on musicpsychology.co.uk, November 1, 2013
  7. ^ Contemporary history collection of the Heilbronn City Archives , call number ZS-5273
  8. ^ The Auerbach Family. The Descendants of Abraham Auerbach , Perry Press 1957, p. 126
  9. ↑ Lukas Gedziorowski, History of the Boxes , on www.journal-frankfurt.de, April 9, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Auerbach, Siegmund
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neurologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 29, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH Nordhausen ( Thuringia )
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 1923
Place of death Frankfurt am Main