Ludwig Edinger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ludwig Edinger (* 13 April 1855 in Worms, † 26 January 1918 in Frankfurt am Main) was an influential German anatomist and neurologist and in 1914 co-founder of the University of Frankfurt. In 1914 he also was appointed as the first German professor of neurology by the King of Prussia.

Ludwig Edinger grew up in Worms, where his father was a very successful textile salesman and a democratic congressman in the state parliament of Hesse-Darmstadt. His wasn't ashamed, that he started his career as a poor man and challenged free schooling for all children, but without success in 1873. Ludwig's mother was the daughter of a physician from Karlsruhe.

Edinger studied from 1872 to 1877 medicine in Heidelberg and Strasbourg. His studies on neurological questions began in his time as assistant physician in Gießen (1877 - 1882). His habilitation was in 1881 about neurological researches. He became a dozent for theses themes. He travelled around and worked at Berlin, Leipzig and Paris and opened his own praxis on neurology in Frankfurt am Main in 1883.

By Edingers initiative in 1885 the pathologist Carl Weigert became director of the Dr. Senckenbergischen Anatomie in Frankfurt am Main, although Weigert had problems in other places with antisemistism. Weigert gave his friend Edinger a place to work in his institute. But first in 1902 Edinger got enough space in the department to start his own neurological department.

In 1909, after a struggle between Edinger and the Senkenberg foundation about the finances of the neurological institute, Edinger left the Senkenberg'sche institute and moved it to the Frankfurt University. In his certificate of appointment as professor was the clause, that he was responsdible for the finacing of the department. That was no problem for Edinger, because in 1886 he married Anna Goldschmidt, daughter of an old traditionally Jewish bankers family of Frankfurt, who got a millions heritage in 1906.

On January 26, 1918 Ludwig Edinger suddenly died by a heart attack. But he ruled that his brain was examined in his institute. The institute went on, because Edinger enacted that after his death there will be a foundation for this institute. until today the neurological department of the medicine faculty of the Goethe-University has the juristical form of a foundation and it's named after Edinger.