(Dr. Sauerbruch makes a fine addition to what he calls "na...)
Dr. Sauerbruch makes a fine addition to what he calls "narrative medicine" in his autobiography for he has some excellent tales to spin and some exciting contributions to record.
Ferdinand Sauerbruch was a German surgeon of international repute. His name was one of the most luminous among the 960 professors who in the autumn of 1933 took a public vow to support Hitler and the National Socialist regime. During the Third Reich he was recognized as the leading surgeon in Germany, frequently operating on top Nazi leaders including Hitler and Goebbels.
Background
Ferdinand Sauerbruch was born on July 3, 1875 in Barmen (now a district of Wuppertal), Germany. Since his father, technical director of a cloth weaving mill, died early, Sauerbruch grew up with his grandfather, master shoemaker Friedrich Hammerschmidt.
Education
In 1896 Ferdinand Sauerbruch began his studies of natural sciences at the Philipps University of Marburg. He then moved to the Medical Faculty of the University of Leipzig, where – after a short study at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena – he received his doctorate under Heinrich Curschmann with a dissertation on a case of softening of the bones of children, A contribution to the metabolism of lime and phosphoric acid in infantile osteomalacia in 1902.
Sauerbruch briefly worked as a country doctor in the vicinity of Erfurt, before becoming an assistant in the surgical department at the Kassel Diakonissenkrankenhaus. The same year he moved to the surgery department of the Erfurt hospital as an assistant, where he became the first assistant physician in 1902. From 1903 Sauerbruch worked briefly at the Berlin-Moabit hospital and in the same year went to the Surgical University Hospital in Breslau (Wrocław Medical University), where he developed the Sauerbruch chamber, a pressure chamber for open-chest surgery of thoracic surgery.
Sauerbruch then moved to the University Hospital Greifswald. In 1908 he became a senior physician in Marburg. Here he was appointed Associate Professor in the same year. From 1910 he was Professor of Surgery at the University of Zurich and Director of the Surgical Clinic and Polyclinic of the Cantonal Hospital Zurich.
At the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered and was an advisory surgeon of the 15th Army Corps in 1914 - 1915. From 1915 he headed surgery in Greifswald and, arriving from Zurich in each case, fitted prostheses to amputated soldiers in the “Vereinlazarett Singen”, where Sauerbruch developed several new types of limb prostheses, which for the first time enabled simple movements to be executed with the remaining muscle of the patient.
Sauerbruch worked as a full professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1918 to 1927 on surgical techniques and diets for treating tuberculosis. In 1918 he became a privy councilor.
After the Munich Hitler coup of 8-9 November 1923, Sauerbruch treated the injured left shoulder of Adolf Hitler, who had fled from the police at Ernst Hanfstaengl’s Uffingen domicile.
From 1928 to 1949, Sauerbruch was the head of the surgical department at the Charité in Berlin, attaining international fame for his innovative operations.
With the rise of the Nazi Party, Sauerbruch participated in a letter supporting Adolf Hitler and in 1937, he became a member of the newly-established Reich Research Council (‘Reichsforschungsrat’) and approved various experiments presumably performed on prisoners of the concentration camps.
In 1942, he became Surgeon General to the army. On 12 October 1945, he was charged by the Allies for having contributed to the Nazi dictatorship, but not convicted for lack of evidence.
Sauerbruch stayed at his hospital throughout the whole war; his operating theatre was literally taken by the Red Army in 1945. Late in life, he became demented and was dismissed from the Charité because he continued to perform surgeries on patients, some with uncertain results. His colleagues detected the errors but were unable to stop him because of his fame and power.
Sauerbruch's position towards the Nazi government is ambiguous and the subject of debate. In his position he was clearly in contact with the political elite but he was never a member of and did not support the political objectives of the NSDAP. He was, however, a fervent nationalist who wanted to undo the "humiliation of Versailles" and was keen to show off his country as an advanced and sophisticated society.
While he had accepted the German Nationalpreis, a short-lived German alternative to the Nobel Prize, he also publicly spoke out for people who were prosecuted. Sauerbruch was one of the few University professors who publicly spoke out against the NS-Euthanasia program T4.
Membership
Sauerbruch was part of the so-called Mittwochsgesellschaft, a group of scientists that included critical voices and was later arrested because his son Peter had ties to Claus von Stauffenberg.
Personality
Although Sauerbruch operated on many prominent patients, he was well known for his uncompromising and passionate dedication to all patients independent of their social, political or ethnic backgrounds.
Besides surgery Sauerbruch concerned himself with dietics; he emphasized the importance of this kind of therapy in persons who had been operated upon. For patients suffering from tuberculosis, he made up a diet renouncing ordinary salt, introducing numerous minerals in its place. Sauerbruch was also a concerned physician and was one of the first to describe stress as a trigger factor in Basedow’s disease. During his service as a military physician in World War I, he had noted that this disease occurred conspicuously frequently in soldiers that had been subject to extreme stress.
Sauerbruch was a living legend, and his circle of patients numbered several famous personalities.
Physical Characteristics:
Sauerbruch's latter years were marred by dementia that adversely affected his personality, intellect, and capacity as a surgeon. The unjustifiable toll of increasing patient morbidity and mortality forced authorities to dismiss him in 1949.
Connections
Ferdinand Sauerbruch had three sons - Hans Sauerbruch, Peter Sauerbruch and Friedrich Sauerbruch.