Otto Lowenstein
Otto Lowenstein, later Otto Lowenstein ( born May 7, 1889 in Osnabrück, † March 25, 1965 in New York), was a German - American neuropsychiatrist and pioneer in the field of research into human pupil.
Life
In Germany
Otto Lowenstein was born the son of Julius Lowenstein and Henrietta Grunewald and grew up in Prussian Oldendorf. He was a sickly child who read a lot, and was sent a year as a foster child to a family in the Black Forest because of lung problems. 1909 converted Lowenstein, of Jewish origin, to Protestantism. Lowenstein studied at the Georg-August -Universität Göttingen mathematics and philosophy, and later at the University of Bonn medicine. After his state examination, he was from the March 28, 1913 Medizinalpraktikant at the Rheinische Provincial Lunatic Asylum, 1914, he received his doctorate in Bonn with the work: The sanity of hallucinating, as measured by psychological principles. In 1920 he married his cousin Martha and Grunewald; they had daughters Anne and Marie Elisabeth Dorothea.
In the soon erupting World War Lowenstein did serve as chief physician of a military garrison nerve station in Metz. After the war ended in 1918 returned to Bonn, he became an assistant at the local neurologists and psychiatrists Alexander Westphal. In 1919 he was resident physician, assistant medical director in 1920 and after habilitation of psychiatry and neurology professor at the University, which in 1923 appointed him to the non-tenured Associate Professor. In 1926 he became the first director of the newly established provincial children's institution for mentally abnormal, the first of its kind in the world, and Director of the Institute for Neurological Psychiatric Genetic Research at the University of Bonn. Together with his wife he conducted more than 100 interviews to explore family-induced neurological disease. He also dealt with pupillography to find out whether one could infer by observation of pupils on mental and neurological disorders and developed the first apparatus and methods for this subject.
On August 11, 1930 Otto Löwenstein was appointed full professor of Pathopsychologie ( Foundation Chair of Rh Landesklinik ). This rapid career aroused envy in the faculty, especially at Walther Poppelreuter, which then stood in the background of an action on 8 March 1933 about 80 SA men, even after Hitler came to power, who wanted to drag him in chains through the city and him in protective custody should take. The Institute was devastated and abused Lowenstein's assistant. Poppelreuter became his successor. Lowenstein had been warned by phone, hid and fled on March 10 over the Saar with his family in Switzerland.
In Switzerland and the USA
In Nyon Lowenstein worked at a private sanatorium La Metairie, which he expanded to a children's hospital. He was also a member of the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva for ophthalmology and there from 1935 Head of the Laboratory for pupillography.
After the Kristallnacht in 1938, where the synagogue in Osnabrueck, his home town, was burned down, Otto Lowenstein decided to leave Europe. In 1938 he emigrated to Canada, where he was a visiting professor in Montreal, and from there to the United States where he worked at the New York University and later at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Together with his assistant Irene Löwenfeld he continued his neuroophthalmologischen research. So in 1957 they built an "electronic Pupillograph " with infrared technology. This equipment has been used in order to measure the diameter of the pupil and was the forerunner of other instruments later years. The experiments and publications of Lowenstein and Lowenfeld were pioneering achievements in the field of pupil research and contributed significantly to the fact that this found its way into the neuro-ophthalmology.
1964 awarded the Faculty of Arts of the University of Bonn Lowenstein honorary doctorate, after he was rehabilitated in 1955 as a professor of the university. While he was writing the last lines of his main work on the pupil at the time, he fell ill with a stomach carcinoma. He handed over the work to Irene Lowenfeld, who had now received his doctorate externally to the University of Bonn with Lowenstein as a mentor and in the following years, finished the book. The more than 2,000 -page book was published for the first time in 1993.
Honors
On 25 June 1993, the new building, in which the " Department of Child and adolescent psychiatry and psychotherapy " and the " Department of Speech Disorders " LVR Clinic Bonn was drafted In 1992, in a ceremony the name: " Prof. Otto Löwenstein- house ".
Publications (selection )
- With Irene Löwenfeld: The Pupil. Anatomy, Physiology, and Clinical Applications. Butterworth -Heinemann 1999. 2223 pages
- The psychological effect restitution
- The interference of the light reflex of the pupil in the syphilitic diseases of the central nervous system. Contributions to the early diagnosis of syphilis nervosa. Basel 1937
- Experimental and clinical studies on the physiology and pathology of the pupil movements with special reference to schizophrenia. Berlin. Karger 1933
- Experimental theory of hysteria. Bonn. Cohen 1923
- Assessed the soundness of the hallucinating after psychological principles. Bonn 1914