Walter von Brunn

Walter Albert Ferdinand von Brunn (born on September 2, 1876 in Göttingen ; died on December 21, 1952 in Leipzig ) was a German surgeon , school hygienist and medical historian .

Walter von Brunn, son of the Göttingen anatomy professor Ferdinand Albert Wilhelm von Brunn (1849–1895) and his wife Antonie, née Guticke (1822–1852), from Anhalt , studied medicine at the Universities of Göttingen and Rostock from 1894 to 1899 . With Carl Garrè he received his doctorate in Rostock in 1899 with the thesis "A contribution to knowledge of the first resorption processes" . He then worked as an assistant at the Anatomical Institute at the University of Greifswald until 1900 , then at short notice as a volunteer at the Hygienic-Bacteriological and Pathological-Anatomical Institute at the University of Göttingen. In 1900 he moved to the Berlin University Clinic as an assistant doctor, and finally in 1903 as an assistant to the Marburg University Clinic .

As a specialist in surgery, von Brunn returned to a private clinic in Rostock in 1905. During the First World War , in which he was promoted to chief physician and commander of a medical company, he lost his right arm as a result of sepsis , which made it impossible to continue working as a surgeon.

Walter von Brunn now switched to the history of medicine and was habilitated in 1919 with Karl Sudhoff , the most important medical historian of his time, with the work "The position of Guy de Chauliac in surgery in the Middle Ages" in Rostock . From 1920 to 1934 he was a full-time city school doctor at the University for Teacher Education in Rostock, where he also worked as a private lecturer until 1924 and then as an associate professor until 1934 . In 1934 he was appointed to the Institute for Medical History founded by Karl Sudhoff to the chair for the history of medicine at the University of Leipzig , which he held as the successor to Henry E. Sigerist until his death in 1952. At the same time, he was director of the Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine and Natural Sciences in Leipzig from 1934 to 1950 , which was named after Karl Sudhoff in 1938 on a suggestion made by Brunns in 1938.

As early as 1930 he was a corresponding member of the Royal Hungarian Society of Doctors in Budapest . In 1935 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , of which he was vice president from 1947 to 1951. In 1936 he took over the editing of Sudhoff's archive . In 1941 he received the Sudhoff plaque from the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology . In 1951 he also became an honorary member of the Surgical-Medical Society and the German Association for the History of Medicine . His "Brief History of Surgery" , published in 1928, is a standard work in the history of surgery, based on Karl Sudhoff's work, but based on technical history, it is based on a continuous further development of surgical knowledge since the 12th century that cannot be proven in every case.

Publications (selection)

• The lymph nodes of the mandibular salivary gland. In: Archives for Clinical Chemistry. Volume 69, 1902, pp. 657-668.
• The position of Guy de Chauliac in surgery in the Middle Ages. In: Sudhoff's archive. Volume 12, 1920, pp. 85-100, and Volume 13, 1921, pp. 65-106.
• From the guilds of barbers and surgeons in the Hanseatic cities. Leipzig 1921.
• Brief history of surgery. Springer, Berlin 1928; Reprinted there in 1973.
• Paracelsus and his doctrine of consumption. Thieme, Leipzig 1941 (= Practical Tuberculosis Library. 26).
• History of surgery. Bonn 1948 (= history of science: history of medicine. 3).
• posthumous: medical journals in the nineteenth century. Contributions to the history of the general medical press. Thieme, Stuttgart 1963.

literature

• Ingrid Kästner: Walter von Brunn (1876–1952). Attempt a biography. In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 13, 1995, pp. 449-458.
• Ingrid Kästner: Walter von Brunn (1876–1952). In: Achim Thom, Ortrun Riha (Ed.): 90 years of the Karl Sudhoff Institute at the University of Leipzig. Karl Sudhoff Institute for the History of Medicine, Leipzig 1996, pp. 44–54.
• Michael Buddrus , Sigrid Fritzlar: The professors of the University of Rostock in the Third Reich. Saur, Munich 2007, pp. 90-91.
• Ortrun Riha : Brunn, Walter Albert Ferdinand von. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 215 f.

Web links

• Brunn, Walter von in the German biography
• Curriculum vitae in the professorial catalog of Leipzig University of Leipzig University
• Walter von Brunn, professors at the University of Leipzig 1945–1993 (PDF), accessed on November 18, 2017
• Entry on Walter von Brunn in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium
• Member entry of Walter von Brunn at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on November 27, 2015.
• Literature by and about Walter von Brunn in the catalog of the German National Library

Remarks

1. ↑ Sönke Drewsen: What does the transcendental-gnoseological understanding of the philosophy of science do for medical theory and medical history? In: Würzburg medical history reports. 8, 1990, pp. 33-40; here: p. 38