Theodor Bilharz

Theodor Maximilian Bilharz (* March 23, 1825 in Sigmaringen, † May 9, 1862 in Cairo, Egypt) was a German physician and scientist.

Life

Theodor Maximilian Bilharz was the son of Sigmaringer Hofkammerrats Joseph Anton Bilharz, who was born in 1788 in the Catholic Herbolzheim im Breisgau. The mother Elsa Fehr came from the Swiss Thurgau and was a staunch Zwinglianerin. His younger brother Alfonso Bilharz (1836-1925) followed in the footsteps of his older brother and took over after his 13 - year stay in North America, the site of the medical director of Prince Carl's Hospital in Sigmaringen.

As a student Theodor Bilharz interested in the nature, operation early entomological studies and also had a small natural history collection and a collection of butterflies. Inspired by a Swiss uncle, who gave him books and exotic Collectibles, his instinct for research was reaffirmed. He attended the Princely Sigmaringer high school and graduated in 1844 a two-year study of medicine at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where Frederick Arnold was his first influential teacher. Arnold, Bilharz later wrote, had " lit the pit light of the anatomical research " him. Outside medicine, he studied everything that interested him: philosophy, ethics, German Language, Literature history, archeology, ancient art history, classical philology, botany, anatomy and anthropology. From 1845 to 1849 he studied at the University of Tübingen. There he heard, among other things Botany at Hugo von Mohl, internal medicine and pathology at Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, surgery in Victor von Bruns and gynecology at Franz Xaver wide. 1847 his treatise on the blood of invertebrates is awarded a prize.

It was followed by the state medical examination, which he passed in Sigmaringen, and then studied again in Freiburg, where he worked on the comparative anatomy of invertebrates at Carl von Siebold. He was in 1850 a doctorate in Tübingen Dr. med.

In 1850 he followed the director of the Egyptian Medizinalwesens appointed Wilhelm Griesinger as an assistant to Cairo, where he became chief physician at various hospitals. He also taught at the Medical University of Cairo and is subsequently appointed in 1855 professor of anatomy and to Major.

In March 1862 he accompanied Duke Ernst II of Saxe -Coburg and Gotha in his trip to Egypt and treated while the typhus wife Alexandrine of Baden. He infected himself and died a few weeks later in Cairo.

In his home town Sigmaringen a school and a pharmacy are named after the physician.

Research

Major scientific merits Bilharz acquired as Helminthologe ( Explorers of worm diseases). He describes 1851 in written communications Distomum haematobium, a worm whose eggs he has detected in the urine of patients and their larvae in the waters of the Nile. The anatomist Heinrich Meckel Hemsbach (1822-1856) named in 1856 in honor of the discoverer of this type Bilharzia haematobia.

As a result, the clinical picture of the then widespread in Africa Blutharnruhr was referred to as " schistosomiasis ". Through its discovery, it was first possible to successfully treat the disease after its onset. During the First World War, the term has been replaced by the term schistosomiasis in the context of politically motivated purge the English language of German loan words and names, the generic name Bilharzia was displaced by the 1858 David Friedrich Weinland introduced genus name Schistosoma. The causative agent of urogenital schistosomiasis Schistosoma haematobium is called today. This language regime, the German -speaking Medicine has joined after the Second World War with a view of the inevitable internationalization of technical terminology.

1857 Bilharz wrote a highly regarded book on the electric organ of the dither catfish. In Egypt, he undertook research next trips on which he described, among others, an African Salmer as a new species ( valid today as Brycinus macrolepidotus Valenciennes, 1849).

Writings

• Alestes macrolepidotus, a new Nilfisch. Proceedings of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences class of the Imperial Academy of Sciences ( Vienna). 9 (1852 ): 169-172.
• The electrische organ of the dither catfish, anatomically described by Theodor Bilharz. Engelmann, Leipzig 1857.