Marc Armand Ruffer

Sir Marc Armand Ruffer (* 1859 in Lyon, † the spring of 1917 on a voyage to Greece ) was an English bacteriologist and was the founder of paleopathology. In addition, he was beaten for his successful fight against cholera and other infectious diseases knighted.

Life

Ruffer was born the son of a banking dynasty Lyon 1859 in Lyon. His mother was a German, his father was the distinguished Baron Jacques de Ruffer. They left her son in Germany, France and England formed. In this Oxford graduate in art and in London he completed a medical degree. He then worked for a short time with Louis Pasteur at the same institution together.

From 1891 he was the first director of the British Institute of Preventive Medicine, now the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine; he was thus Joseph Lister's direct predecessor. In his study of the time life-threatening diphtheria are Ruffer infected with the pathogen. By thus triggered nerve paralysis he had to give up this post.

He went then to the goal of recovery in the warm North African climate to Cairo. Shortly after his arrival there he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology at the Cairo Medical School and became a worldwide reputation bacteriologist and hygienist. In Cairo, he examined one of the first physicians systematically mummy remains and skeletons and found, among other symptoms of arteriosclerotic, lung and tuberculosis disease. He achieved this, in which he developed an efficient and gentle method for rehydration of cellular tissue, which was taken from mummies, which in the 60s of the 20th century had still existed. Among other things, discovered that schistosomiasis was prevalent 3000 years ago in Egypt, thus paving the Paläoparasitologie.

He became Chairman of the Egyptian Council for "Hygiene, lake and Quarantine ", which he succeeded in the eradication of cholera in Egypt, what was the reason for the accolade by the British crown along with its other merits. In addition, he worked with in the Indian Plague Commission and has been with the outbreak of the First World War, the leading person of the Egyptian Red Cross.

Another great success Ruffers was the direct detection of tuberculosis tracks in the soft tissue of Egyptian mummies of the 21st Dynasty. The assumption that the ancient Egyptian population suffered from tuberculosis, could be until then confirmed only by indirect evidence and the result was disputed among colleagues.

He examined a total of thousands of mummies and published the results from 1917. Among other things, he examined 253 skeletons from the Alemanni from the 6th to 8th centuries from the southwest of Germany and summarized the results in his 1918 published article " arthritis deformans and spondylitis in ancient Egypt " together.

Marc Armand Ruffer probably died in the late effects of Diptherieerkrankung in the spring of 1917 by sea to Thessaloniki, where he was to reorganize the health service of the Greek government. Four years after his death, his collected scientific articles have been published under the title " Studies in the Palaeopathalogy of Egypt ." These are still considered as the standard work of paleopathology.

Works (excerpt)

• Rheumatoid arthritis and spondylitis in ancient Egypt. , 1918.
• Studies in the Palaeopathalogy of Egypt. In 1921.
• Note on the presence of " Bilharzia haematobia " in Egyptian mummies of the twentieth dynasty [ 1250-1000 BC] British Medical Journal, Jan 1910 Vol 1, No 2557, p 16, doi: 10.1136/bmj.1.2557. 16-a