Quincke, heinrich irenäus

(¤ 1842, † 1922) Internist.

Heinrich Irenäus Quincke was born into a family of physicians in Frankfurt/Oder in 1842. He began his medical studies at the age of 16, first in Berlin, later in Würzburg and Heidelberg. In 1863 he received his doctorate in Berlin and passed the medical state examination there in 1864. After an extended educational trip that took him to Vienna, Paris and London, and a short period of surgical work, he began internal medicine training at the Charité in Berlin at the age of 26 under Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs, with whom he also habilitated in 1870.

In 1873, at the age of 30, he was appointed to the chair of internal medicine at the University of Bern. In his private life, he married Berta Wrede, a Berlin businesswoman's daughter, during this period. In 1878 H.I. Quincke was appointed full professor of internal medicine and director of the Medical Clinic at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. He worked there for 30 years, was dean of the medical faculty four times and became rector of the university in 1900. A decades-long grueling dispute with Kiel's Ordinarius of Surgery Friedrich von Esmarch over the priority of a new clinic building, in which Quincke was ultimately defeated, temporarily overshadowed his time in Kiel. In 1908, Quincke angrily wrote a letter of resignation from the university services, as he was repeatedly denied a promised clinic building. After his retirement, Quincke moved to Frankfurt/Main and worked scientifically in the Senckenberg Institute until his death on May 19, 1922.

In addition to internal medicine, Heinrich Irenäus Quincke also held pediatrics, skin and venereal diseases, hygiene and bacteriology in the early years in Kiel until he established his own chairs. He introduced lumbar puncture in a lecture in 1891 at the 10th Congress of Internal Medicine. Between 1909 and 1922, Quincke was on the list of Nobel Prize contenders several times. However, the achievement of lumbar puncture was too long ago to be considered for the Nobel Prize according to the statutes.

Another achievement of Quincke in 1896 was the introduction of a surgical treatment of lung abscesses and caverns called pneumotomy after previous iatrogenic adhesion of the pleural sheets, which gave significant impetus to lung surgery. In 1903, H.I. Quincke, together with the Königsberg surgeon Garré, wrote a "Grundriss der Lungenchirurgie" (Outline of Lung Surgery).

In the field of internal medicine, Quincke earned lasting merits, among other things, through his descriptions of the shift in capillary pulse in aortic insufficiency and gastric mucosal atrophy. In 1898, he demonstrated the resorption of inorganic iron from the gastrointestinal tract as a prerequisite for therapy of iron deficiency anemia.

Quincke's innovative contributions to the field of dermatology include the discovery of the animal favus pathogen, now known as Trichophyton quinckeanum, and his view of the syphilitic genesis of aortic aneurysms.

Today, the name Qunicke is primarily associated with angioneurotic edema. It is true that even before Quincke's publication in 1882, there were casuistic reports of cases of disease in Italy, Germany, and Great Britain that can be retrospectively attributed to angioneurotic edema. Quincke's merit, however, is to have clearly worked out the characteristic features.

1. Göring HD (2002) Heinrich Irenäus Quincke: inventor of the lumbar puncture. Dtsch Arztebl 99: A-1173 / B-975 / C-918
2. Quincke H (1882) On acute circumscribed skin edema. Monatsh Prakt Dermatol 1: 129-131