Walther Berblinger

Walther Berblinger (born July 13, 1882 in Karlsruhe , † April 10, 1966 in Muri near Bern , Switzerland ) was a pathologist and university professor .

Life

He was the son of the businessman Karl Wilhelm F. Berblinger (1856-1912) and his wife Franziska, née Bils (1856-1944). After attending the Grand Ducal Gymnasium in Karlsruhe (today: Bismarck-Gymnasium Karlsruhe ), Berblinger studied medicine at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the University of Strasbourg , where he took the medical exam in 1907 and took part in 1908 the theme "On the spore formation and germination of Bacillus mesenteric ruber" doctorate . In 1909 he married Hedwig, née Elstaetter, who came from a Jewish factory owner family.

Berblinger began his career as an assistant to Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen (1833-1910), the first person who described and named "Recklinghausen's disease", a student of the famous Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). Recklinghausen taught general and special pathology in Strasbourg. He became a role model for Berblinger. Berblinger followed Martin Benno Schmidt in April 1911 to Marburg, where he became his first assistant at the local institute for pathology. His habilitation thesis , reviewed by Schmidt , dealt with the glycogen content of the human heart muscle , and he dedicated his inaugural lecture to acromegaly . During the First World War , Berblinger served as a medical advisor in the reserve hospital in Meiningen . He was co-editor of numerous specialist journals, including since 1915 the Centralblatt for general pathology and pathological anatomy . Georg Dhom describes the forced termination in 1939 as follows: "In 1939 he was forced to give up this activity: a shameful event that also documents the increasing isolation of German pathologists under National Socialism." In 1916 he was appointed titular professor at the Philipps University in Marburg . In the 1920s he received several offers from universities. However, he decided to take the chair at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena , which he held until 1937. With his studies on reproduction, he made a significant contribution to the establishment and consolidation of the emerging discipline of endocrinology .

Scientific Research

In Jena he founded the theory of the partial functions of the pituitary gland and devoted a great deal of energy to proving the functional connection between the diencephalon and the adenohypophyseal system . In his work on the pars intermedia , the intermediate lobe of the human pituitary gland, he showed the function, morphology and ontogenesis of the oldest part of the gland, paying special attention to the pathogenesis of pituitary diseases. Berblinger had already discovered in 1920 that the gonadotropic anterior pituitary hormones, of which little was known at the time, are produced in the anterior basophilic lobe.

Another focus was on the relationship between morphological and functional disorders of hormone production and their effects on the male reproductive organs. As early as 1920 he was able to demonstrate hypogonadism of the pituitary gland, which in turn leads to atrophy of the Leydig interstitial cells. His contributions to the pineal and pituitary glands in humans were of fundamental importance . In addition, Berblinger was one of the first researchers to describe the influence of streptomycin on miliary tuberculosis and tuberculous meningitis . Other areas of work were arteritis and nerve regeneration.

Consequences of National Socialism

In 1937 he came under increasing pressure from the National Socialist regime because he was married to a Jew. He was asked to get a divorce, but he refused to comply. He was considered to be “Jewish-versed”. He came before his release and persecution and emigrated to Switzerland at the turn of 1937/38 . His wife followed him in September 1938. There he took over the management of a tuberculosis research institute in Davos , which he headed until 1954. Berblinger did pioneering work there in the field of tuberculosis research , especially in the field of tuberculosis therapy, for example: "Anatomical studies on cavern healing (suction drainage according to Monaldi)". After the war, the authorities refused him a pension for his decades of work as a university lecturer in the German Reich, even though he was financially poor. He refused the call to Hamburg and Heidelberg. He was also refused a return to his old chair in Jena. In his opinion, he should instead be fobbed off with the fact that he had "only" been offered a professorship in forensics and not in pathology. When the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena finally awarded him an honorary doctorate for his services as a pathologist during the celebrations for the 400th anniversary in 1958, Berblinger saw this as recognition of his work at the University of Jena and as a late sign of goodwill, but still declined to accept it personally. The honorary membership in the German Society for Endocrinology, awarded in 1956, and the award of the Ernst von Bergmann plaque by the German Medical Association a few months before his death were a late homage to Berblinger's services to medical science.

Honors

• 1956 honorary member of the German Society for Endocrinology
• 1958 Honorary doctorate from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena
• 1965 Ernst von Bergmann plaque from the German Medical Association

Publications (selection)

Over 230 scientific publications with a focus on pathology and endocrinology.

• Internal secretion in the light of morphological research (Jena, 1928).
• Pathology and pathological morphology of the pituitary gland (Leipzig, 1932).
• The question of hypertension, Basel, Schwabe, 1941.
• Pituitary gland and lactation, Basel, Schwabe, 1941.
• Intestinal bleeding when the inferior vena cava is occluded, Basel, Schwabe, 1942.
• The shrinkage of tubercular lung caverns, Basel, 1943.
• Negative Aschheim-Zondek reaction in chorionic epithelioma of the uterus, Basel, Schwabe, 1944.
• Tuberculosis of the trunk bronchi and tuberculous bronchostenosis, Basel, Schwabe, 1944.
• Forms and causes of cardiac hypertrophy in pulmonary tuberculosis, Bern, 1947.

literature

• Ulrike Holzmann: The work of Prof. Dr. med. Walther Berblinger as director of the Pathological Institute Jena . University of Jena, Jena 2001 ( GoogleBooks - Dissertation).
• Peter Hermann-Josef Korte, The activities of the Marburg Institute of Pathology under Leonhard Jores and Walther Berblinger 1913-1918 , dissertation, Philipps University Marburg, 2014.

swell

• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss: Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933-1945 . De Gruyter, 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-096854-5 , pp. 81 ( GoogleBooks [accessed March 25, 2020]).
• Janina Sziranyi, Stephanie Kaiser, Mathias Schmidt, Dominik Groß : “ Jüdisch versippt ” and “materialistic”: The marginalization of Walther E. Berblinger (1882–1966) in the Third Reich. In: Pathology - Research and Practice. 215, 2019, p. 995, doi : 10.1016 / j.prp.2019.02.006 .
• Kiel list of scholars, Walther Berblinger .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dietrich von Engelhardt, Bibliographische Enzyklopädie deutschsprachiger Mediziner 1, KG Saur, Munich 2002, p. 45.
2. ↑ George Dhom, history of histopathology, Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg u. a., 2001, ISBN 3-540-67490-X , p. 423.