Eduard Dorsch

Background

Eduard Dorsch was born on January 10, 1822 in Wurzburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was the son of Francis L. Dorsch (died in 1825), attache of the Bavarian court, and his wife, Elizabeth.

Education

Dorsch received his early education in a Catholic institution, entering the University of Munich in his eighteenth year.

Medicine was his principal study, subsidiaries were natural sciences, botany, and philosophy.

Though confining himself closely to his profession, Dorsch could not remain aloof from the anti-slavery movement.

Career

Dorsch's early lyrics, “Idle Hours of a Munich student, ” reveal an independent thinker in the oppressive environment of reaction and fundamentalism.

After the completion of his work in 1845 he was sent by the Bavarian State to Austria, to supplement his theoretical knowledge with larger practical experience in the hospitals of Vienna.

On his return he soon became involved in the liberal movement that fascinated young thinking minds throughout Germany. Escaping capture, he came to America, reaching Detroit in the autumn of 1849.

Dorsch lived in Monroe the rest of his life. He persistently refused all political offices, except the appointment to the Michigan State Board of Education, 1872-78.

In the later sixties he accepted the position of examining surgeon of the Pension Office, which he continued to hold until his death.

While acting as pension examiner he prepared a draft showing the course and effects of a bullet in the human body, an investigation which was published as authoritative by the Pension Office.

Three volumes of German lyrics represent Dorsch’s poetic work.

The first, entitled Kurze Hirtenbriefe an das deutsche Volk diesseits und jenseits des Ozeans (1851), are the poems of his youth, revolt, and exile.

The second, called Parabasen (Milwaukee, 1875), is a collection of satires in verse after the manner of the German poets Platen and Prutz.

The last volume, Aus der alten und neuen Welt (1884), is a selection of the best of his poems from early youth to the date of publication.

He was not a poet of passion and genius, but of calm, penetrating reflection, a clear thinker, whose style was correct, smooth, virile. Seeking the land of the free, he found there a trafficking in human flesh and he joined in the fight for the liberation of humanity.

Coming with romantic notions of the splendors of the primeval forest, he found it destructive of human life and cultural ideals.

Disillusioned in all of his fondest expectations, the poet yet sought happiness in service of the most unselfish kind, that of the frontier surgeon who labors for the sick and suffering, night and day, with meager financial returns and without the glamour of fame. He felt keen satisfaction in never having lost a maternity case, and gloried in the gratitude of the pioneers.

Intimate friends of Dr. Dorsch described him as a man of retiring disposition, a lover of books and the means of culture.

Achievements

• Eduard Dorsch has been listed as a noteworthy physician, poet by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Aus der Alten und Neuen Welt: Gedichte. (German Edition)

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • Parabasen 1875 Hardcover

    (Lang:- German, Pages 67. Reprinted in 2015 with the help ...)

Politics

Dorsch became a stanch adherent of the new Republican party, and was presidential elector from the second Michigan district, supporting Abraham Lincoln.

Views

Dorsch looked deeply into human life, knew its joys and illusions, and gave them sin cere utterance. He had a rich emotional experience to disclose; a lover of liberty, he was expelled from his dearly beloved native land, because he wanted to rid it of princes, priests, and drones.

Interests

• Dorsch had a large library in his home, paintings, and works of art.
  
  His collections of bugs, butterflies, and botanical specimens knew no end.
  
  In his garden there was an immense cage containing wild birds and animals, also a pond with blooming lotus plants that he had imported from Egypt, and a well with marble slab and Greek inscription praising the pure water.
  
  He bequeathed his books in part to the University of Michigan and in part to the city in which he lived.

Connections

His second wife left the Dorsch home to the city of Monroe, founding there the Dorsch Memorial Library. A year after the death of his first wife, he married, in 1885, Augusta (Korte) Uhl.

Father:

Francis L. Dorsch

Mother:

Elizabeth

Second wife:

Augusta (Korte) Uhl

Friend:

Bruckner