Owsei Temkin

Owsei Temkin (also: Ovsej Temkin, born October 6, 1902 in Minsk, † 18 July 2002) was a German -American physician and medical historian.

After the pogroms against the Jews in 1904, the family fled from Minsk to Leipzig, where Owsei Temkin grew up. After an excellent graduating from the Schiller Grammar School he entered the University of Leipzig to study medicine with emphasis on dermatology and medical history, which he in 1928 with the dissertation " The systematic context in the corpus Hippocraticum " graduated. Followed in 1931 by his habilitation thesis "History of Hippokratismus in the late antiquity " in Henry E. Sigerist and Karl Sudhoff, the founder of the history of medicine as a scientific discipline in Germany. In 1933 he received a ban on teaching at the university.

Temkin belonged to Henry E. Sigerist, Ludwig Edelstein and Erwin Heinz plowman Germany's leading historians of medicine who emigrated in the period of National Socialism in the United States. He researched and taught for decades at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and in 1960 the George Sarton Medal Award, the highest prestigious award for the History of Science, founded by George Sarton and Lawrence Joseph Henderson History of Science Society ( HSS).

The focus of his work were, among others, in research on the history of Byzantine medicine, epilepsy and gynecology. He published fetal position manuscripts with signatures of cash and Rinus Vossanius.

Owsei Temkin died shortly before his 100th birthday. The Festschrift for multi-day anniversary celebrations that were planned among other things with his two daughters, was already printed by the University of Baltimore.

Works

• The Falling Sickness. A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginning of Modern Neurology. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1945 1994 ( 2 durchg. Edition). ISBN 0-8018-4849-0.
• Soranus ' Gynecology. Baltimore and London, 1991.
• On Second Thought, in: "On Second Thought " and Other Essays in the History of Medicine, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
• Together with C. Lilian Temkin: Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein, 1967.
• Byzantine Medicine: Tradition and Empiricism, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 16 (1962 ), pp. 97-115 ( paid download on JSTOR ).
• Together with Bentley Glass and William L. Straus Jr.: Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859 ( The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968) ISBN 0-8018-0222-9.