Ludwik Hirszfeld

Ludwik Hirszfeld, also Ludwig Hirschfeld ( * August 5, 1884 in Warsaw, † March 7, 1954 in Wroclaw, Poland) was a Polish physician and immunologist.

Life

Hirszfeld was co-founder of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In the years 1907-1911 he worked in Heidelberg on the name of the blood groups and was instrumental in the determination of the heredity of the blood groups. He was a professor of universities in Warsaw and Lublin, since 1945 in Breslau. There he was involved in the development of the Rhesus blood group system. In 1954, he was founder of the Institute of Immunology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw.

Today's designations of blood groups A, B, AB and 0 were introduced in 1910 by him together with Emil von Dungern and 1928 also adopted internationally.

Later, he also dealt with bacteriophages. Today, the Ludwik - Hirszfeld Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy, Polish Academy of Sciences in Wroclaw is the only institute in Poland, where patients can leave with chronic bacterial infections where antibiotics have failed to deal with bacteriophages.

In October 1939 Hirszfeld was evicted from his apartment. When all Warsaw Jews were imprisoned in the ghetto, Hirszfeld found as a baptized Jew a hotel in the rectory of the Church of All Saints within the ghetto wall. In July 1942, he fled to Miłosna, a suburb of Warsaw, where he found a hiding with friends. There he lived incognito under a false name as unemployed expert in pest control. Then he fled on to Klembów and experienced there the end of Nazi rule. He was instrumental in the founding of the Lublin Marie Curie University, then in organizing the Polish University of Breslau.