Werner Hügin

Werner Hügin (born March 15, 1918 in Basel ; † January 30, 2001 in Riehen near Basel) was a Swiss pioneer in anesthesia and a professor at the University of Basel .

Life

Hügin was the son of a simple employee at Geigy and attended grammar school in Basel, a boarding school in Schiers and graduated in 1937 in Zurich. He studied medicine in Basel, interrupted by military service during the Second World War. In 1944 he finished his studies and became an assistant at the University Clinic Basel (Bürgerspital) with the surgeon Carl Henschen , who sent him to the USA in 1947 ( Massachusetts General Hospital , with Henry K. Beecher ) to learn new techniques of anesthesia (an American The patient had previously refused to be operated on in Basel because anesthetists were unknown there). He had previously published in 1947 about a self- experiment with curare that an American patient made available to him. At that time, anesthesia did not yet exist in Switzerland as an independent discipline within surgery and was delegated to nursing staff or assistants.

After his return in 1949, Hügin became head of the anesthesiology department at the surgical university clinic in Basel. This was followed by stays in Oxford in 1950 with Robert Reynolds Macintosh and Stockholm with Torsten Gordh in 1951. In 1952 he was one of the founders of the Swiss Society for Anesthesiology. Rudolf Nissen , Professor of Surgery , who moved to Basel in 1952, promoted anesthesiology and saw to it that a corresponding institute was set up with Hügin as chief physician. Hügin completed his habilitation in anesthesiology in 1955, received the venia docendi in 1957, became associate professor in 1963 and full professor in 1965 in Basel. In 1978 he resigned as chief physician at the Cantonal Hospital in Basel, but remained active as a doctor at the Basel Pain Clinic.

Hügin is co-author of the first German-language anesthesia textbook, which was first published in 1955.

In 1952 he was co-founder and co-editor (with Rudolf Frey , Otto Mayrhofer-Krammel ) of the journal Der Anästhesist , which was published by Springer-Verlag.

He was married to the painter Dorette Hügin (née Straumann) and played the piano and organ as a hobby.

Fonts

• with Rudolf Frey, Otto Mayrhofer-Krammel: textbook of anesthesiology and resuscitation. Springer, 1955, 2nd edition 1971, 6th edition 1991

literature

• MC Schneider, W. Niederer, K. Skarvan: Werner Hügin- pioneer of anesthesiology in Switzerland. In: The anesthetist. Volume 50, 2001, pp. 456-459.