History of the Institute

The Institute was founded in 1992 as the Institute for the History of Medicine. The founding director was Prof. Dr. med. Josef N. Neumann. The institute’s premises were located at Krausenstraße 14 until 1998, then at Magdeburger Straße 27. Since 2007, the institute has been housed in rooms of the former Eye Clinic on the Magdeburger Straße campus. The institution, which has since been renamed the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine, was headed by Prof. Dr. phil. Florian Steger between 2011 and 2016. Prof. Dr. med. Jan Schildmann, M.A. was appointed director of the institute in the summer semester 2018.

History and Ethics of Medicine at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

The first medical history college at the Friedrichs-Universität Halle, founded in 1694, can be traced back to the year 1717. In that year, the polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687–1744), a student of Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742), began “to explain the physiology, anatomy and history of medicine and subsequently chymistry to a large audience” (1). After a longer intermezzo at the University of Altdorf, Schulze returned to the Fridericiana Halensis and, from 1733 onwards, regularly read on various medical historical topics and personalities. His lectures were public and repeatedly mentioned in the columns of the Wöchentlichen Hallischen Anzeigen. Schulze, who was also an important numismatist, used mainly coins as demonstration objects.

After Schulze’s death, the teaching of medical history in Halle became somewhat quieter in the following decades. New and significant impulses then came from Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833), who received his doctorate in medicine in Halle in 1787 and initially practiced medicine. Exceptionally talented and fluent in nine languages, Sprengel gave botanical lectures at the university in addition to his medical work. At the same time, he published extensively, including translations of important ancient authors, such as Galen, whose theory of fever he translated into German. In 1795, Sprengel was appointed a full Professor of Pathology, to which he devoted himself no less intensively than to the history of medicine. Two years later, he was also appointed to the Chair of Botany, which included the management of the botanical garden. At this time, Sprengel had already begun his main work in the history of medicine, the multivolume attempt at a pragmatic history of pharmacology. With this epoch-making work and as a member of numerous academies and scientific societies, he had an impact far beyond the newly founded Vereinigte Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in 1817 and advanced to become one of the most famous medical historians of his time. Sixty years after his death, his knowledgeable colleague Julius Pagel would write about him that Sprengel deserves the honorary title of the “father of medical historiography” (2).

While Sprengel, as a physician, botanist and historian of science, could still be considered a proven expert in several fields, this is less and less possible for his intellectual descendants in the course of the 19th century. The increase in knowledge in medicine and the natural sciences was too great, and the urge to specialise and form subdisciplines was too strong. The turn of medicine towards the natural sciences and the establishment of experimental research methods made the authorities of past epochs seem obsolete and less important. Under this development, medical historiography lost some of its importance. At the end of the 19th century, the history of medicine, which 100 years earlier had been an integral part of medicine as a matter of course, found itself in a marginal position. Philosophy, for many centuries regarded as the “sister of medicine” fared little differently. In 1861, the tentamen philosophicum in Prussia was replaced by a preliminary examination in the natural sciences, the tentamen physicum, whereby the study of medicine largely lost its humanities components (3).

In Halle, too, medical history as a research and teaching subject lagged behind the general upswing in science-oriented medicine toward the end of the 19th century. The medical history lectures and publications of the pathologist Rudolf Beneke (1861–1946), who was appointed to Halle in 1911, met with little response either from his listeners or from other medical historians. Meanwhile, the physiologist Emil Abderhalden (1877–1950) from Halle and the Protestant theologian Fritz Jahr (1895–1953) made important contributions, especially to ethical issues in medicine, science and society. In the early 1920s, Abderhalden founded Ethics, one of the first medical ethics journals in the world (4). Jahr, who worked as a pastor and teacher after studying theology in Halle, coined the term “bioethics” in an essay in 1926. Jahr wanted it to mean not only the moral consideration of humans but also of the animal and plant world (5). This extended meaning of the term was largely lost in the course of its international spread in the second half of the 20th century.

It is the internist Theodor Brugsch (1878–1963), appointed to Halle in 1927, who with his universal education also gave the history of medicine more visibility at the faculty again. Already in his inaugural lecture, he dedicated himself to the history of Halle’s clinics (6) and, in the following years, regularly offered lectures on medical history. When the university forced him to give up his position in 1935 because of his Jewish wife, it expelled not only an urbane internist but also a knowledgeable medical historian. The liberal Brugsch was replaced by the National Socialist Otto Geßner (1895–1968), who in 1936, succeeded Martin Kochmann, who had been driven to his death by the National Socialists, as director of the Pharmacological Institute. In 1939, the history of medicine became a compulsory lecture throughout Germany. This was intended to convince students of the supposed historical necessity and moral rightness of National Socialist health policy (7). Geßner was arrested by American military in May 1945 and dismissed from the university.

The history of medicine in the German Democratic Republic (GDR: Deutsche Demokratische Republik), founded in 1949, was not initially part of the compulsory curriculum of medical studies. Students in Halle at the end of the 1940s were instead offered a lecture by Bernhard Koenen (1889–1964), communist veteran and co-founder of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, on The Political and Social Problems of the Present. Ten years later, the course offerings

expanded and differentiated. Thus, in the academic year 1958/59, medical students had to attend lectures and seminars on the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, which had become the state doctrine of the GDR. In addition, Hans-Heinz Eulner (1925–1980), pharmacologist and also lecturer in the history of medicine, offered an optional lecture on great physicians of the 19th and 20th centuries, a colloquium on the history of medicine and an introduction to the technique of scientific-literary work. Moreover, Rudolph Zaunick (1893–1967) deserves to be mentioned as an important research personality of that time, who had been a professor of history and documentation of natural sciences in Halle since 1952. Two years later he was appointed director Ephemeridum and, thus, editor of the journal of the Leopoldina. His promising student Eulner moved to the Federal Republic in 1959, where he received a full professorship for the history of medicine in Göttingen in 1967 (8).

In the mid-1960s, a new player enters the scene in the person of Wolfram Kaiser (1923–2008). Coming from the field of internal medicine, where he also habilitated, Kaiser received a professorship with a lectureship in the history of medicine in 1967. In 1975, the Martin Luther University appointed him to a full professorship for the history of medicine. A considerable number of publications on the history of medicine came from him and his research group, which included the physician and medical historian Arina Völker. Many publications were produced in collaboration with Werner Piechocki (1927–1996), the long-time director of the Halle City Archives. Thematic foci included the history of the university and its medical faculty from the 17th to the 19th century, research on medicine and the Enlightenment, and the international scientific relationships of the University of Halle (9). Kaiser became emeritus professor in 1988.

At the end of the 1970s, the GDR introduced compulsory courses on the history of medicine and the topic of the physician and society, in which questions of medical ethics were also increasingly addressed. Several symposia in Halle, some of them international, were devoted to historical and ethical issues in medicine. Finally, a Department of Marxist-Leninist Ethics in Medicine was established, affiliated with the Medical Faculty, and Ernst Luther (born 1932) was appointed its director in 1987. After the GDR’s accession to the Federal Republic of Germany on 3 October 1990, the department was dissolved at the end of 1991. The newly advertised chair for the history of medicine was filled in 1992 and Josef N. Neumann (born 1945) was appointed (10). Two years later, in September 1994, the institute hosted the 77th Annual Meeting of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. Finally, in 1999, the institute was renamed the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine.

Literature

1. Johann Christoph von Dreyhaupt, Beschreibung des Saal-Creyses, vol. II, Halle 1755, here cited after: Arina Völker, Medizinhistorischer Unterricht in der Gründungsepoche der Universität Halle, in: dies./Burchard Thaler (eds.), Die Entwicklung des medizinhistorischen Unterrichts, Halle 1982, pp. 65–73, 66. For detailed information on Schulze, also see Wolfram Kaiser/Arina Völker, Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687–1744), Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg 1980/45 (T 38), Halle (Saale) 1980.

2. Ernst Wunschmann/Julius Pagel, Sprengel, Kurt, in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. by the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, vol. 35 (1893), pp. 296–299, 298. For a detailed account of Sprengel, see Wolfram Kaiser/Arina Völker, Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833), Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg 1982/31 (T 46), Halle (Saale) 1982.

3. Cf. Petra Lennig, Benötigen Ärzte Philosophie? Die Diskussion um das Philosophicum 1825–1861, in: Johanna Bleker/Marion Hulverscheidt/dies. (eds.), Visits. Berliner Impulse zur Entwicklung der modernen Medizin, Berlin 2012, 55–71. See also Thomas Bohrer et al, Die Schwester der Medizin. Warum wir heute wieder ein Philosophicum brauchen, in Deutsches Ärzteblatt 107 (2010), A 2591–2592 and Beat Gerber, Warum die Medizin die Philosophie braucht. Für ein umfassendes Verständnis von Krankheit und Gesundheit, Bern 2020.

4. Cf. Andreas Frewer, Medizin und Moral in Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus. Die Zeitschrift “Ethik” unter Emil Abderhalden, Frankfurt/New York 2000.

5. Cf. Florian Steger/Jan C. Joerden/Maximilian Schochow (eds.), 1926 – The Birth of Bioethics in Halle (Saale) by the Protestant Theologian Fritz Jahr (1895–1953), Frankfurt 2014.

6. Cf. Theodor Brugsch, Die Klinik in Halle (historisch), in: Sudhoffs Archiv 20 (1928), pp. 17–32.

7. Cf. Florian Bruns, Medizinethik im Nationalsozialismus. Developments and Protagonists in Berlin (1939–1945), Stuttgart 2009, pp. 57–71.

8. Cf. Florian Bruns, Zwischen Verflechtung und Abgrenzung: Das Fach Medizingeschichte im geteilten Deutschland (1945–1959), in Medizinhistorisches Journal 49 (2014), pp. 77–117, 96f.

9. Cf. Horst Hesse (ed.), Medizinhistorische Schriften von Wolfram Kaiser (Halle), 3rd edition, Kleve 2006.

10. Cf. Josef N. Neumann, Medizinethik in Ostmitteleuropa, in Journal of Medical Ethics 53 (2007), p. 323.