Volker Zahn

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Tooth with Murnau-Werdenfelser cow and bull

Volker Zahn (born November 10, 1940 in Mittweida , Saxony ) is a German doctor and state-approved building biologist. Although actually a specialist in gynecology , Zahn is considered a pioneer and thought leader in environmental medicine and holistic medical approaches in the field of conventional medicine . His parents are the surgeon Hans Zahn (1900–1973) and Marta Zahn, b. Fickratz (1906-1984). He is the third son of four children, and all of his siblings became doctors.

Life

The impression of the war and post-war shortage and the absence of the father, who was in Soviet captivity until 1949, as well as the four-week annual work in agricultural businesses that is mandatory for schoolchildren and students, shaped Zahn early and lastingly. At times he thought about studying agriculture, which his father advised against because of the developments in the GDR. So Zahn began to study medicine like his father and received his doctorate in 1965 at the medical faculty of the University of Rostock. In the same year, with the help of Hasso Herschel , he managed to escape to the FRG via Romania , Yugoslavia and Austria in a prepared American car . After Herrschel's job as a refugee ended in 1967, Zahn, Herrschel and Ulrich Pfeifer set out from Germany to cross Africa from Ceuta to Cape Town by land in a Land Rover for several months , which Zahn was unable to complete for professional reasons. Since then, he has been friends with Herschel for decades. Since the FRG recognized all qualifications of the GDR without any problems, Zahn was able to begin his compulsory assistantship seamlessly in a newly built miners' hospital in Püttlingen in Saarland . Further stations of his assistant work were the hospital Barmherzige Brüder in Regensburg and the clinic for anesthesiologist of the LMU in Munich. In 1974 Zahn completed his training as a specialist in gynecology at the LMU. Five years later, at the age of 39, he was appointed professor to head the women's clinic at St. Elisabeth Hospital in Straubing, where he worked until 2005, the last 20 years of which as medical director and lecturer. Since his retirement, Zahn has been running a 40-hectare farm near the Alps and is dedicated to preserving domestic animal breeds that are threatened with extinction.

Act

Act as a doctor

Even at the beginning of Zahn's activity as a doctor and gynecologist in Straubing , increasing environmental awareness also reached medicine. Zahn came up against the limits of his conventional medicine both through breast milk contaminated with environmental toxins , for which there were no binding limit values ​​as yet, and through previously unknown disease symptoms. He summarized some of the complaints described to him under the term "house disease". Zahn was one of the first doctors to establish a connection between well-being and accelerated healing. That is why he furnished every room in his hospital with an original painting and founded an association in the St. Elisabeth Hospital to look after patients with artistic activities. He recognized the importance of environmental protection in hospitals early on. As early as 1991, Zahn coordinated a working group of 25 Bavarian hospitals to avoid and dispose of waste in order to curb the flood of rubbish in hospitals, practices and laboratories. For this achievement he was honored as a co-laureate of the Bavarian Environmental Medal for the first environmentally friendly hospital. Zahn received support for this pioneering work from the Bavarian Environment Minister Alfred Dick , who lives in Straubing and who supported Zahn's pioneering work in the field of environmental medicine, among other things by placing numerous graduates in the St. Elisabeth Hospital. Zahn received further support from Hubert Weinzierl , the longstanding chairman of the Bund Naturschutz in Bayern , who had set up his environmental education center in Wiesenfelden in the Straubing-Bogen district. Under Zahn, Straubing developed into an interdisciplinary center for environmental protection, nature conservation and environmental medicine in the 80s and 90s. As a doctoral supervisor, Zahn supervised numerous doctorates on the medical aspects of environmental protection. In doing so, he made a significant contribution to raising awareness and spreading awareness of the relationship between the environment and wellbeing. In 1994, Zahn was the first Bavarian physician to be awarded the additional designation of environmental medicine by the Bavarian State Medical Association (BLÄK) .

Rehabilitation study: tooth with hybrid and Swabian-Hall pigs

Act as an ecological thought leader

After his retirement in 2005, Zahn realized his childhood dream, albeit with the experience and knowledge of an environmental doctor. He acquired an old estate, the Schalhamer Hof in the foothills of the Alps on the border between Upper Bavaria and the Allgäu, which he converted into a self-sufficient Arche-Noah-Hof to save and preserve dying breeds of domestic animals. The farm has its own source with excellent water quality, a biological reed sewage treatment plant, solar energy with overcapacity, wood chip heating from its own waste wood stock, vegetable cultivation for personal use and natural, climate-neutral to climate-positive animal husbandry. Missing food or excess capacities come from or into the food sharing cycle. Additional work required is rewarded in kind. The endangered domestic animal breeds kept by Zahn include the Murnau-Werdenfelser cattle , the Swabian-Hallic pig , the German Mittelspitz , the Augsburg chicken and the Thuringian forest goat . Cold-blooded animals , mountain sheep , domestic cats and other farm animals also live on Zahn's farm . It is mainly thanks to Zahn's commitment that the population of the Murnau-Werdenfels cattle has increased again. Together with his friend, Hans Hinrich Sambraus , he carried out a highly acclaimed study on the rehabilitation of hybrid pigs on his farm in 2015 in order to draw attention to the urgent need for near-natural pig farming. The preservation, as far as possible, of untouched nature and habitats are also a focus of his work. His promotion of a nature park Ammergebirge and the natural preservation of the Lech loop near Schongau are examples of this. Even if Zahn never worked as a great publicist, he campaigned in a special way to spread his goals and ideals. Right from the start, his Noah's Ark Court has been a meeting place for school classes and students on the one hand and nature in all its diversity on the other. Every year school classes visit him for one or more days to deal with the topics of sustainability, untouched nature and life close to nature and animal husbandry. Once a year, the chairs for art education at the University of Augsburg and the LMU Munich hold multi-day design seminars on environmental topics. These works, flanked by other works belonging to the same topic, have been shown for many years in an annual exhibition in the courtyard's own artificial tennis court, in order to reach an even broader public and especially the youth, whose task, in Zahn's opinion, is to preserve the environment and protect. Since 2019 his son Hans, who has a PhD in life science, has been running the farm in the spirit of his father.

Writings as author and co-author

  • with Claus Schulte-Uebbing: Environmental Medicine. Applied environmental protection in health care. UMGEWE, Straubing 1991.
  • Environmental handbook for medical practices: The low-waste medical practice. 1992.
  • Environmental medicine primer for practical environmental medicine. 1994.
  • with Ruediger Dahlke, Margit Dahlke: women - healing - customer. Meaning and chances of female clinical pictures. Goldmann, 2003, ISBN 3-442-15204-6 .
  • with Ruediger Dahlke, Margit Dahlke: The way into life: Pregnancy and birth from a holistic perspective. Goldmann, 2009, ISBN 978-3-641-01018-8 .
  • Small breviary of the Murnau-Werdenfelser cattle. 41 Rules of conduct for suckler cow husbandry. Self-published, Kreut 2012.

Web links

  • merkur.de Exhibition "Longing for the Wilderness"
  • merkur.de exhibition "Wilderness in Us"
  • baeuml-rossnagl.de Exhibition "Wilderness in Us", opening lecture
  • [1] Lecture: "A life without plastic is possible" - Zahn as environmental medicine
  • [2] 10 years of art on the Arche yard

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Home Disease". Retrieved November 5, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Friends of the Straubing Clinic - project examples. Retrieved September 4, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Avoidance and disposal of waste in hospitals. (PDF) Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Co-laureate Bavarian Environmental Medal. Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Dissertation v. Achim-Jürgen Spechter on environmental toxins. (PDF) Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  6. ^ Preservation of the Murnau-Werdenfelser cattle. Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Rehabilitation of the hybrid pig. Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Painting seminar with Volker Zahn. Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  9. ↑ 10th annual exhibition Noah's Ark Hof. Retrieved July 2, 2017 .
  10. ^ Zahn, Hans: Scalable whole-genome single-cell library preparation without preamplification. Retrieved September 9, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Zahn, Volker
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor and state-approved building biologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Mittweida