Wolfgang Geisthövel

Wolfgang Geisthövel (* 1940 in Frankfurt am Main ), lives in Cologne and Berlin, is a German doctor and writer.

Medical activity

Wolfgang Geisthövel studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau , Erlangen , Vienna , Düsseldorf and Hamburg from 1959 to 1965 . In 1968 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the relationship between sex and disease from a surgical point of view at the surgical university clinic in Göttingen . In 1969/70 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Bonn . From 1971 to 1978 he worked as an assistant doctor in the department for clinical endocrinology and as head of the laboratory for the determination of steroid hormones in the department of internal medicine at the Medical University of Hanover with training as a specialist in internal medicine (1975). In 1976 he completed his habilitation with the thesis examinations of the hypophyseal testes function in men with diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease and chronic liver disease . From 1978 to 1982 he was senior physician at the Medical Clinic of the Elisabeth Hospital in Cologne, and from 1982 to 2005 chief physician at the Medical Clinic of the Heilig Geist Hospital in Cologne. Since 1981 he has been a member of the Medical Faculty of the University of Cologne .

Writing activity

Since his youth, Geisthövel has made numerous trips, sometimes with interruptions to his medical work. After three travel books about the Mediterranean region, Latin America and Southeast Asia with a cultural, historical and ethnological focus, Wolfgang Geisthövel began a “literary search for traces” project, in which journeys are planned according to literary action spaces. He sought out scenes and places that are connected with the work of great writers and poets in order to find out whether and how a place, a landscape found an echo in the work. The resulting travelogues combine personal experience and the narrative voice of the real traveler with the diverse "voices" of the authors and thus strive for a connection between real and literary reality.

Geisthövel became famous for his book Between Ahnenkult and Video , which was written in 1986 after three trips through Indonesia and describes Southeast Asia in encounters with the people living there and their history. Geisthövel went on a site-specific “search for traces” with the books Hölderlins Schwaben (1996), Reisen in Uwe Johnson's Mecklenburg (2001) and No visit to Lawrence Durell (2002). Geisthövel is also the author of specialist medical books.

Collection of literary travel reports

In addition to his own writing, Wolfgang Geisthövel has compiled an extensive collection of literary travel reports over the past 35 years, starting with Laurence Sternes Sensitive Journey to contemporary authors such as Christoph Ransmayr , Cees Nooteboom or Wolfgang Büscher .

Works

• Travel in North Africa. Econ Verlag , Vienna 1974, ISBN 3-430-13096-4 .
• Travel in Latin America . Econ Verlag, Vienna 1978, ISBN 3-430-13097-2 .
• Between ancestral culture and video . Keil Verlag, Bonn 1986, ISBN 3-921591-36-8 .
• Holderlin's Swabians . Heliopolis-Verlag, Tübingen, 1996, ISBN 3-87324-113-7 .
• Travels in Uwe Johnson's Mecklenburg . Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2001, ISBN 3-356-00890-0 .
• No visit to Lawrence Durell . Donat Verlag , Bremen 2002, ISBN 3-934836-24-0 .

• On the way with Odysseus through the Mediterranean. Artemis and Winkler, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 978-3-538-07248-0 .
• Brazil. A literary journey. Horlemann, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-89502-355-2 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolfgang Geisthövel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DNB catalog entry: The relationships between gender and disease from a surgical point of view.
2. ↑ DNB catalog entry: Investigations into the function of the pituitary testes in men with diabetes mellitus, chronic kidney disease and chronic liver disease