Background
Stanislaus Josef Mathias von Prowazek, Edler von Lanow was born on November 12, 1875, in Jindřichův Hradec, Bohemia. His father was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and was ennobled in 1893.
Stanislaus Josef Mathias von Prowazek, Edler von Lanow (12 November, 1875 Jindřichův Hradec, Bohemia – 17 February, 1915, Cottbus), born Stanislav Provázek, was a Czech zoologist and parasitologist, who along with pathologist Henrique da Rocha Lima (1879-1956) discovered the pathogen of epidemic typhus.
Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
In 1895 Prowazek began to study natural science at the University in Prague.
University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Prowazek followed Hatschek to the University of Vienna, from which he received the Ph.D. in 1899, with a dissertation entitled Protozoen Stadien.
Stanislaus Josef Mathias von Prowazek, Edler von Lanow, a Czech zoologist and parasitologist.
microbiologist parasitologist scientist Zoologist
Stanislaus Josef Mathias von Prowazek, Edler von Lanow was born on November 12, 1875, in Jindřichův Hradec, Bohemia. His father was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and was ennobled in 1893.
Prowazek received his primary education in the Plzen Gymnasium. In 1895 Prowazek began to study natural science at the University in Prague, where he came under the influence of the zoologist Berthold Hatschek and of the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. After two years’ study, he followed Hatschek to the University of Vienna, from which he received the Ph.D. in 1899, with a dissertation entitled Protozoen Stadien.
After receiving the Ph.D. in 1899, Prowazek continued his zoological work with Hatschek both in Vienna and at the zoological station in Trieste until 1901, when he went to Paul Ehrlich’s Institute for Experimental Therapy at Frankfurt. The following year Prowazek worked in Richard Hertwig's department at Munich, where he continued his earlier cytological investigations of flagellates and investigated the reproductive modes of infusorians.
In 1903 he accepted an invitation from Fritz Schaudinn, whom he had met in Trieste in 1901, to work as his assistant at the zoological section of the University of Berlin at Rovigno.
In 1905 Schaudinn - following his discovery, with Hoffmann, of the spirochete that causes syphilis - was appointed a director of the zoological section of the Institut fur Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten in Hamburg; upon his premature death the following year (at the age of thirty-five), Prowazek was named his successor.
Prowazek had taken part in Neisser’s 1906 expedition to Java; at Batavia he and Ludwig Halberstadter discovered the inclusions in the epithelial cells from the conjunctivas of trachomatous eyes that are now called Prowazek’s bodies or Halberstadter- Prowazek bodies. At the same time, he began his studies of vaccinia. After a short visit to Japan, Prowazek returned to Hamburg, from which he made several other research expeditions.
In 1908 he went to Rio de Janiero to study the etiology of vaccinia and variola at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz; two years later he visited the German colonies of Western Samoa, Yap, and Saipan to explore the causes of a number of infectious diseases, among them trachoma, fowl pox, Newcastle disease, silkworm jaundice, epitheliosis desquamativa conjunctivae, and molluscum contagiosum.
In 1913 and 1914 Prowazek traveled to Serbia and Constantinople, where typhus was raging. He made observations on the etiology, mode of transmission, and life cycle of the parasite causing the disease, and devoted the last two years of his life to studying it. He himself died of typhus when, in 1915, he and Henrique da Rocha-Lima were sent to investigate an epidemic that had broken out among Russian prisoners confined in a camp near Cottbus. Da Rocha-Lima contracted the disease at the same time but recovered to isolate the causative microorganism, which he called Rickettsia prowazekii, in honor of both Prowazek and H. T. Ricketts, who had also died of typhus while investigating it.
Prowazek considered general aspects of biology in even his specialized studies. His work led him from morphology and developmental studies to an investigation of unicellular organisms, which he examined by means of physicochemical methods, in an attempt to understand the underlying principles of life. He was not, however, a systematic theoretician, but rather developed the ideas of others by systematic research.
Quotations: “At the bottom, we never succeed in freeing ourselves from premature generalizations, and again and again, we only propose new schemes and abbreviations of shorter or longer duration to the multiplicity of facts.”
Around 1893 Prowazek, then a student in the Plzen Gymnasium, altered the spelling of his name from the original “Provazek.”
As a person, Prowazek was a cultivated man who wrote and worked with facility. His interests were wide, and his publications include works of fiction, which he signed “P. Laner.” During his expeditions to the South Pacific, he became enchanted by the tropics and fond of the primitive peoples; his book on the Mariana Islands is concerned with their history, flora, fauna, and ethnography.