August of Aquarius

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August of Aquarius

August Paul von Wassermann (born February 21, 1866 in Bamberg , † March 16, 1925 in Berlin ) was a German immunologist and bacteriologist . In 1906 he published a serological method for the detection of syphilis , the Wassermann test .

family

August von Wassermann came from the Jewish banking family in Bamberg and Berlin, who were ennobled in Bavaria in 1910. He was the second son of the Bavarian court banker Angelo von Wassermann and married on December 3, 1895 Alice von Taussig (1874-1943), the daughter of Theodor von Taussig and sister of the painter Helene von Taussig (1879-1942), who turned out to be adults had been baptized catholic. Alice von Wassermann was - like her sisters Clara von Hatvany-Deutsch and Helene von Taussig - a victim of the Holocaust . August and Alice's son, Robert von Wassermann (1897–1943), fled to Belgium. In the mid / late 1930s, Alice, who was seriously ill, emigrated to Brussels to live with her son Robert, whose wife was of non-Jewish origin. However, Robert was deported to the Saint-Cyprien internment camp in 1940 and to the Mechelen (Malines) assembly camp in 1943, where he was murdered.

Life

Urn of August von Wassermann in the Columbarium urn cemetery

He completed his medical studies from 1884 to 1889 at the universities of Erlangen , Vienna, Munich and Strasbourg , where he received his doctorate in 1888. After his license to practice medicine he went to Berlin as a trainee in 1890 and in 1891 joined the newly founded Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases , which was headed by Robert Koch and later named the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases . After his habilitation in 1901, he became an assistant doctor, then a senior physician and later - as successor to Ludwig Brieger (1849–1919) - head physician in the institute's clinical department . In 1902 he was appointed associate professor.

In 1906 he took over the management of the independent department for experimental therapy and serum research . In the same year he published together with Albert Neisser and Carl Bruck the reaction for the serodiagnosis of syphilis, which was later named after him . From 1913 until his death Wassermann was director of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Experimental Therapy in Berlin-Dahlem . In 1921 he was awarded the Aronson Prize . From 1918 to 1925 Wassermann was a member of the board of trustees of the Fürst Donnersmarck Foundation .

He is buried in the urn cemetery on Richtstrasse . His grave is designated as the honor grave of the city of Berlin .

Scientific work

August von Wassermann is mostly known for the Wassermann reaction, but he was also active in many other areas of bacteriology and immunology. Of his work, however, the development of the serodiagnostics of syphilis gained the greatest practical importance and made his name world-famous. Wassermann dealt mainly with procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

In 1902, Wassermann and Robert von Ostertag developed a so-called polyvalent serum for the treatment of pig disease . At that time, this disease caused great damage in agriculture with piglet mortality of up to 70%. Treatment with the new serum reduced this number to 10 to 20%. All other healing sera developed up to then had only been effective in some cases in the case of mild disease courses. Even the active immunization of pigs against pig disease did not lead to a reliable protective effect, despite numerous attempts. Hygienic measures were also insufficient to combat the disease. The great healing success of the serum from Wassermann and Ostertag can be explained by the large number of bacterial strains used for production . In addition, before each use of the serum, they tested in a laboratory test whether it had any protective effect against the particular strain of pig disease. If it did not, the serum was not released. In the reports from veterinarians who had used the serum, the positive results of the therapy outweighed the overall results. The results of the serum therapy could be further improved by the introduction of simultaneous vaccination by Wassermann, Ostertag and Julius Bernhard Citron . The active vaccination of the animals, which was carried out at the same time as the serum therapy, now led to long-term protection against the disease.

Despite its effectiveness, the importance of the swine disease serum decreased over time. This was mainly because it was often used after misdiagnosis . There were a number of diseases that could easily be confused with pig disease. Recent research had also concluded that pig disease was a relatively rare disease. In addition, it was not possible to clearly determine which bacteria caused this disease.

Wassermann's work on the therapy of swine fever from 1906 had been successful in laboratory tests. However, they had no practical impact, since the actual pathogen causing swine fever was only discovered at this time. The bacterium Wassermann had worked with, however, only appeared as part of a secondary infection. Therefore, other therapy attempts have now been made.

The polyvalent meningococcal serum , which Wassermann developed together with Wilhelm Kolle in 1906, achieved greater practical importance than the pig epidemic serum . It was the first effective remedy for treating meningitis . While the mortality from this disease without serum therapy was 65-80% and in infants even up to 100%, it could be reduced to up to 20% by using the meningococcal serum. All previous attempts to obtain a therapeutically effective serum had been unsuccessful. Wassermann and Kolle also developed a new method to determine the content of specific protective substances in the healing serum. Since the animal experiment was not suitable for this, they used the complement fixation reaction in the modification according to Wassermann and Bruck. Meningococcal extracts were used as antigens. This procedure was later used in the state testing of the serum.

Wassermann also made attempts to fight meningococci in the throat of healthy people with the help of dried meningococcal serum. He wanted to prevent the disease from spreading. However, these experiments do not appear to have had any practical impact.

The importance of the polyvalent meningococcal serum decreased somewhat when it was discovered that there were few different types of meningococci. For this reason, people sometimes switched to giving the patient a monovalent serum that was directed against the pathogen present in each case. From 1912, the first successful attempts to actively vaccinate people against meningococci were made. Nevertheless, after Wassermann and Kolle von Neufeld, the meningococcal serum was ranked second among all serum preparations after the diphtheria serum. In addition to the reduction in mortality, the serum also led to a shorter duration of illness and convalescence, as well as less occurrence of severe secondary conditions after meningitis had been overcome. Today meningococcal meningitis is only treated with antibiotics.

According to Kutscher, Wassermann and Kolle had, through their studies of meningococci, together with the work of other researchers, confirmed the etiological importance of these bacteria in meningitis. They were also able to demonstrate that the meningococci were always Gram-negative when using the Gram stain . Their staining method was also recommended later for staining meningococci. Wassermann and Kolle have not only developed the first usable serum for treating meningitis, but have also gained new knowledge about the causative agents of this disease.

Wassermann had made successful attempts at chemotherapy for mouse tumors from 1910 onwards . By injecting eosin - selenium into the bloodstream, he was able to regularly kill the tumor cells and bring about healing without attacking the healthy cells of the organism. At that time, only surgical procedures and local treatments with various compounds were common in tumor therapy in humans, which could no longer lead to healing in an advanced tumor stage. Wassermann had thus proven that it was possible to selectively destroy a tumor with chemical agents from the bloodstream. The eosin served as a “carrier” for the active substance selenium. However, Wassermann was not the first to be able to cure tumors with chemicals. Other authors had previously had the idea of ​​bringing medicines to a certain place with the help of "transporters". Wassermann was the first to succeed in bringing a substance with a tumor affinity to the cells using a carrier and in all cases to destroy the tumor. Other researchers, however, were only able to achieve healing in a few cases. Wassermann's experiments meant that efforts were made to find other carrier substances such as eosin and other tumor-affine substances than selenium. In Blumenthal's opinion, Wassermann's experiments did not provide any usable results for tumor therapy in humans. Wassermann himself had always warned against the assumption that his results were also valid for humans.

In 1914 Wassermann carried out experiments to answer the question of what effect radioactive rays had on tumor cells. There have been many attempts to heal tumors with radiation, but the mechanism by which radiation acts was not clear. Wassermann's experiments showed that the rays had a direct effect on the tumor cells, without any influence from other substances or cells of the organism. As Wassermann also found, the irradiated tumor cells were not killed, as was often assumed at the time, but their ability to multiply was restricted. In this way he was also able to explain why irradiation could lead to sterility . The germ cells were also prevented from multiplying by the effects of radiation . According to Wassermann, the actual killing of the tumor cells should be caused by aging or by the cell-killing forces of the organism. For the effect of radiation, he established the law that a tissue reacts more sensitively to radiation the faster its cells multiply. With his experiments Wassermann has already established important facts that are still valid today in the radiation therapy of tumors. In Wolff's opinion, however, his experiments only confirmed observations that were known earlier.

In contrast, the Wassermann reaction was something completely new. Wassermann, Albert Neisser and Carl Bruck were the first to succeed in using the complement fixation reaction developed by Jules Bordet and Octave Gengou to diagnose syphilis. They had found the first useful method for the serodiagnosis of this disease. After initial criticism and doubts about the specificity of the reaction, this method was finally recognized worldwide. However, it was not until 15 years after the first description that it was possible to elucidate the nature of Wassermann's reaction. It turned out that the original theory of Wassermann, Neisser and Bruck was not correct. The reaction did not detect antibodies against the syphilis pathogen, but antibodies against the body's own lipoids . Nevertheless, there was no doubt about the clinical usefulness of the method.

With the help of Wassermann's reaction, it was possible to detect the infection in dubious cases and in latent syphilis and thus initiate treatment. The success of a therapy could also be checked with the help of the reaction, whereby errors also occurred and there were doubts about the reliability of the test. Using Wassermann's reaction, it was shown that syphilis was much more common than previously thought. With the help of serodiagnostics, it was possible to identify patients with latent syphilis who did not show any clinical symptoms . It was also an important tool for differential diagnosis . It was now possible to determine whether a symptom or an illness was caused by syphilis. The detection of secondary diseases of syphilis was also made possible. Using the reaction, it had been shown that there was a connection between syphilis and various diseases of the central nervous system (e.g. progressive paralysis and tabes dorsalis ) as well as of the internal organs (e.g. aortic aneurysms and aortic valve insufficiency ). The Wassermann reaction was also very important for the diagnosis and prophylaxis of congenital syphilis, the origin of which could now be explained. It was not, as previously assumed, caused by the father's sperm infecting the egg. Rather, the implementation of Wassermann's reaction had shown that in all cases of congenital syphilis the mother was latently ill with syphilis and thus infected the child. Treating the mother could protect the child from infection. In this way, the number of premature births and infant mortality could be reduced. With the help of Wassermann's reaction, it was possible to gain significant new knowledge about the course of syphilis.

Over time, the Wassermann reaction and its modifications were replaced by the later developed flocculation reactions. For more than fifty years, up to the 1960s, it was quite common to carry out the Wassermann reaction. While other more reliable methods are now used to diagnose syphilis, flocculation reactions are still used to determine the activity of the syphilitic infection. The same antibodies are detected as with the Wassermann reaction.

Fonts

Aquarius in literature

Wassermann's evidence of syphilis infection is mentioned in a shaky rhyme by American author Dorothy Parker :

I'd rather flunk my Wassermann test
Than read a poem by Edgar Guest.

I would rather leave “positive” on my Aquarius test
than just one of Edgar Guest's poems.

Honors

Since May 24, 1951, a street in Berlin-Adlershof (then GDR) has been called Wassermannstrasse. A square in Berlin-Zehlendorf was named after him from 1930 to 1938; today Corrensplatz and in the area of ​​the then already existing "science location" Dahlem. Its renaming was obviously in connection with the Jewish relatives.

literature

  • Ludwik Fleck : Origin and Development of a Scientific Fact. Introduction to the doctrine of thinking style and thinking collective (first 1935). With an introduction edited by Lothar Schäfer and Thomas Schnelle . 4th edition. Frankfurt am Main 1999.
  • Peter Krause: August von Wassermann (1866-1925). Life and work with special consideration of the Wassermann reaction. Mainz, Univ., Diss., 1998.
  • Ilana Löwy: Testing for a sexually transmissible disease, 1907-1970: The history of the Wassermann reaction. In: Virginia Berridge / Philip Strong (Ed.): AIDS and contemporary history. Cambridge UP, 1993, pp. 74-92.
  • Lutz Sauerteig: Illness, Sexuality, Society. Venereal diseases and health policy in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Stuttgart 1999.
  • Barbara I. Tshisuaka: Aquarius, August Paul 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. 1467.
  • Wassermann, August von , in: Joseph Walk (Ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 379

Web links

Wikisource: August von Wassermann  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. Wedding book for the Israel. Cultusgemeinde in Vienna , accessed on June 6, 2014
  2. Insa Meinen, The Deportation of Jews from Belgium and the Foreign Exchange Protection Command , in: Johannes Hürter u. Jürgen Zarusky [ed.], Occupation, Collaboration, Holocaust. New Studies on the Persecution and Murder of European Jews. With a report by Wassili Grossman, series of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 97, Munich 2008, pp. 45–80, here: p. 65
  3. ^ Sebastian Weinert: 100 Years of the Fürst Donnersmarck Foundation 1916–2016 . Berlin 2016, p. 68, urn : nbn: de: 0168-ssoar-48867-6 .
  4. Bernard Zalc: Some comments on Fleck's Interpretation of the Bordet-Wassermann Reaction in view of present biochemical knowledge. In: Robert S. Cohen, Thomas Schnelle (Ed.): Cognition and Fact. Materials on Ludwik Fleck. Dordrecht 1986, pp. 399-406.
  5. Arthur Freudenberg: Again a warning to be careful in the diagnostic use of Wassermann's reaction. In: Berlin clinical weekly. Volume 53, 1916, p. 1154 f.
  6. Clarence A. Andrews: Michigan in Literature . Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1992, p. 260
  7. Wassermannstrasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  8. Wassermannplatz . In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein