Walter Pagel

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Walter Pagel around 1936
Walter Pagel around 1945
Magda and Walter Pagel, 1978

Walter Pagel (born November 12, 1898 in Berlin , † March 25, 1983 in London ) was a German-British pathologist and medical historian .

Life

Walter Pagel is the son of the medical historian Julius Leopold Pagel . In 1920 he married Dr. Magda Koll, with whom he lived until her death in 1980. The two had a son, Bernard Pagel .

After graduating from the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Berlin, Pagel studied medicine at Berlin University from 1916 to 1921 . From August 1917 to November 1918 he did military service as a patient carrier. After his license to practice medicine and his doctorate in Berlin in 1922, Pagel was employed from 1923 to 1926 and again from 1928 to 1930 at the Tuberculosis Hospital of the City of Berlin in Sommerfeld (Osthavelland). In between (from 1926 to 1928) he worked as a prosector at the Pathological Institute of the University of Tübingen . After a short stay at the Institute of Medical History in Leipzig Pagel 1930 was as an assistant to Heidelberg, where he was in 1930 for the subjects Pathological Anatomy and History of Medicine Habilitation . 1933 had Pagel with his wife and three year old child because of his Jewish descent to emigrate (his older brother Albert Pagel came in the Holocaust). He lived first in Paris and later in Cambridge , where he worked in the tuberculosis settlement Papworth, and published numerous papers on the history of medicine, although he worked full-time as a pathologist at various London hospitals, in 1939 as head of the pathology department at Central Middlesex Hospital. Pagel died in London in 1983.

Pagel was mainly concerned with research on tuberculosis , which he turned to when he fell ill and was at the special hospital for tuberculosis in Sommerfeld in Havelland , whose chief physician Helmuth Ulrici allowed him to do experimental work in the hospital while he was recovering. He later returned to the hospital as a pathologist.

As a medical historian investigating the “importance of religion and speculative thinking for scientific medicine”, Pagel dealt in particular with Paracelsus , Johan Baptista van Helmont (whose rise to Artzney art he re-edited) and William Harvey and Rudolf Virchow . With Pagel, a paradigm shift began in Paracelsus research. Pagel described Paracelsus not as a German monolith, but as a mixed European person who took up contemporary impulses from the Renaissance and dealt with Neoplatonism and Gnosis . Pagel also showed that Paracelsus had also included elements of the Jewish Kabbalah , i.e. Jewish mysticism, in his teaching.

The Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University awarded Pagel an honorary doctorate in 1966. In 1970 he was awarded the George Sarton Medal , the highly prestigious prize for the history of science from the History of Science Society (HSS) founded by George Sarton and Lawrence Joseph Henderson . In 1969 he received the Dexter Award for his contributions to medical history. In 1976 he was elected an honorary member of the British Academy . In 1982 he received the Robert Koch Medal for his tuberculosis research .

Fonts

Medical history

  • Johann Baptist van Helmont. Introduction to the philosophical medicine of the baroque. Berlin, Springer Verlag 1930.
  • Virchow and the basics of 19th century medicine. Jena 1931 (= Jena medical-historical contributions , 14).
  • as ed. with Joseph Needham : Background to Modern Science: ten lectures at Cambridge arranged by the history of Science Committee 1936 , Cambridge University Press 1938 (lectures by Arthur Eddington, among others )
  • The religious and philosophical aspects of van Helmont's science and medicine. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1944
  • Paracelsus. An introduction to philosophical medicine in the era of Renaissance. Basel / New York, Karger 1958; 2nd edition, Basel / Munich / Paris / London / New York / Tokyo / Sydney 1982.
    • German translation: The medical worldview of Paracelsus. Its connections with Neoplatonism and Gnosis. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1962 (= Cosmosophy. Volume 1).
  • with Marianne Winder: Gnostic with Paracelsus and Konrad von Megenberg. In: Gundolf Keil, Rainder Rudolf, Wolfram Schmitt, Hans J. Vermeer (eds.): Specialist literature of the Middle Ages. Festschrift Gerhard Eis. Stuttgart 1968, pp. 359-371.
  • William Harvey's biological ideas. Selected aspects and historical background. Basel / New York, Karger 1967.
  • William Harvey revisited. In: Hist. Sc. Volume 8, 1969, pp. 1-31, and Volume 9, 1970, pp. 1-41.
  • Paracelsus, van Helmont, Virchow and the changes in the ontological concept of disease. In: Virchow's archive for pathological anatomy. Volume 363, 1974, pp. 183-211.
  • New light on William Harvey. Karger 1976
  • Johan Baptista van Helmont. Reformer of Science and Medicine. Cambridge 1982.
  • Religion and Neoplatonism in Renaissance medicine. Edited by Marianne Winder. London 1985.
  • From Paracelsus to Van Helmont: studies in Renaissance medicine and science. London 1986 (edited by Marianne Winder).

medicine

  • Together with Wilhelm Roloff : On the virulence of the tubercle bacilli in pulmonary tuberculosis . In: Contributions to the Clinic of Tuberculosis, Volume 72 (1929), pp. 685 ff.
  • The general pathomorphological basis of tuberculosis . Berlin, Springer Verlag 1927.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang U. Eckart , Volker Sellin , Eike Wolgast (eds.), The University of Heidelberg in National Socialism, Heidelberg 2006, p. 980 ff.
  2. ^ M Winder, R Burgess: Walter Pagel (12 November 1898 to 25 March 1983). In: Med Hist. 1983 July; 27 (3): 310-311. PMC 1139339 (free full text)
  3. ^ The medical historiography in Heidelberg: The early 20th century: Walter Pagel , accessed on June 11, 2013.
  4. ↑ Volker Roelcke (2005), p. 1088 a .
  5. ↑ With Friedhelm Kemp and others. Munich, Kösel Verlag 1972
  6. ↑ Heinz Schott : Paracelsus in the medical historiography of the 20th century: On the meaning of Walter Pagel , in: Ralf Bröer (ed.): A science emancipates itself. The medical historiography from the Enlightenment to postmodernism , Centaurus Pfaffenweiler 1999, pp. 161–172; (Modern history of medicine and science, Ed. Wolfgang U. Eckart , Vol. 9)
  7. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 14, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Pagel, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British pathologist and medical historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1983
Place of death London