Wilhelm Roehl

This article deals with the pharmacologist and physician Wilhelm Roehl; on the lawyer see Wilhelm Röhl .

Wilhelm Roehl , also Röhl, (born April 16, 1881 in Berlin ; † March 3, 1929 in Wuppertal -Elberfeld) was a German pharmacologist and physician at Bayer -Werken (Wuppertal-Elberfeld), known for the development of various chemotherapeutic agents.

Roehl attended the humanistic grammar schools in Naumburg and Halberstadt and studied medicine at the University of Halle and the University of Heidelberg with the medical state examination in 1903 and the doctorate to Dr. med. 1905 (On the use of nitrogenous foods in digestive disorders) with Albrecht Kossel in the Institute for Physiology. In 1905 he went to Paul Ehrlich at the Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt, where he began to be interested in chemotherapy for tropical diseases, first in trypanosomes , the pathogens that cause sleeping sickness. In 1906/7 he was briefly in the Giessen University Hospital with Friedrich Moritz , where he dealt with the formation of kidney stones, and then again with Ehrlich in Frankfurt. In 1910 he was with Hans Horst Meyer in the pharmacological institute of the University of Vienna and from 1911 he was in the newly established pharmacological department of the Bayer works in Wuppertal-Elberfeld. During the First World War, he worked as a doctor at the front from 1915 to 1918 and then returned to Bayer, where he headed the chemotherapy department from 1922 and received power of attorney in 1927 .

At Bayer, he examined the effectiveness of the germanine developed there against sleeping sickness and of pamaquin (plasmochin) against malaria . Plasmochin was the first synthetic antimalarial agent and was developed by chemists ( Fritz Schönhöfer , August Wingler , Werner Schulemann ) at Bayer in 1924/25 . Roehl carried out, among other things, the toxicological investigations and the examination of the effectiveness in animal experiments (including bird malaria and in the mouse model, where he found that the effect of plasmochin did not go through the immune system), but also on sick people, for which he went to the tropics and traveled the Mediterranean. He died two years after the introduction of Plasmochin, and Walter Kikuth was his successor at Bayer as a pharmacologist .

Characteristic deposits at the edge of red blood cells in anemia are called Roehl edge bodies.

literature

• August W. Holldorf, New German Biography, NDB

Fonts

• Basic questions in chemotherapy, German Medical Weekly, Volume 52, 1926, 2017–2021