Arnold Theiler

Arnold Theiler ( born March 26, 1867 in Frick, † July 24, 1936 in London) was a Swiss veterinarian in South Africa.

Life

His parents were Franz (1832-1901) and Maria (born Jenny ), his siblings Marie ( * 1873) and Alfred ( 1882-1967 ). He was a citizen of Hasle in Entlebuch and studied veterinary medicine in Bern and Zurich and completed his state examination in 1889.

Theiler settled in Beromunster, where he was not up to the competition. Unhappy in his private practice, he learned of a diplomat, that there is no veterinary were in South Africa, and immigrated in 1891 to South Africa, where he abhandenkam all the instruments on the trip. He worked first as a farm laborer for Alois Hugo Nellmapius in Pretoria, which was still the capital of the last Boer Republic of South Africa, where he gained experience in a chopping machine and lost his hand. After a year he worked as a veterinarian. Was founded in 1891 in Grahamstown, the Colonial Bacteriological Institute under the guidance of the physician and bacteriologist Alexander Edington (1860? -1928 ).

When in August 1892 in Swaziland smallpox broke out, it was feared that they might reach the Transvaal. Theiler procured the vaccine from abroad and was prepared so that, as in 1893 in Johannesburg erupted smallpox. The epidemic gave him the opportunity to prove his scientific knowledge and his organizational skills for the production of pox lymph. Thus he gained the confidence of the President Paul Kruger and was the country vet the Transvaal.

After the defeat of the Boers in the Second Boer War began Theiler's actual career. He was the founder of the Institute of Veterinary Medicine and thus the entire veterinary services in South Africa.

In 1893, he married his former classmate Emma Sophie Jegge ( 1868-1951 ), who had financed his passage to Africa.

Robert Koch, who was called in 1897 during an outbreak of the coast fever, could identify Koch's blue bodies, whose life cycle Theiler cleared up completely as a cause of a new parasite. As an intermediary, he made the brown ear tick off ( Rhipicephalus appendiculatus ) whose distribution is limited to eastern and southern Africa.

1908 founded the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute Theiler. He worked in South Africa and with the botulism, as this disease in 1927 occurred in cattle.

For his services he was defeated in 1914 by the British King George V knighted. His son, Prof. Max Theiler developed a vaccine against yellow fever and in 1951 awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.