Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene/Volume 1/Fritz Schaudinn: A Biographical Sketch
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
By W. CARNEGIE BROWN, M.D., M.R.C.P.
(Friday, January 17th, 1908)
To the ordinary student of Tropical Medicine, who reads Protozoology, not so much with the hope of acquiring special knowledge as with the intention of keeping au courant with advances made in a science that so nearly touches his own subject, there is no more striking fact than the repeated and authoritative citation of the name and work of Schaudinn. And when we reflect, further, that all this vast amount and variety of research was achieved in the short span of a life that did not extend to thirty-five years, that the facts adduced were, mostly, entirely new, that the work was addressed to men whose business it is to be wary and circumspect—men who have only too much reason to say of alleged discoveries that, if new, they are not true, and if true, they are not new—when we think of all these things, I say, we are constrained to ask the question, "What manner of man was this?" Yet, beyond actual workers in biological science, few in England know anything of the personality, of the human element in Schaudinn's career. Striking and phenomenal as it was, our own contemporary literature has almost passed it by, and it is only by treading somewhat unbeaten tracks in Continental records that one may hope to obtain even such a meagre gleaning of details as I venture to offer you to-night.
Frederick, or familiarly, and as he preferred to be called. Fritz Schaudinn was born in the little village of Roseningken, in East Prussia, on the 19th September, 1871. The cold grey Lithuanian skies now look down on peaceful and uneventful scenes, but, in bygone days, there had been tumult and stir enough on these troublous Russian Marches. Sixty-five years before, the stolid agriculturists had been startled by Napoleon and his legions as they thundered past on their way to Eylau and Friedland; dire poverty had not sufficed to save their homesteads from being utterly wasted during the military occupation of Konigsberg; they had lain in the track of the Madman of the North and his Goths in their fierce irruptions into Europe; and for seven long years their very existence had been at stake during the struggles of the Great Frederick for the safety of his people and the integrity of his dominions. Even as young Schaudinn was born the last echoes of the Franco-German war were but dying away, and the friends and relatives of the Schaudinn family were returning to their homes in East Prussia from the distant service with the national army; but peace and tranquillity had come at last, and the boy was able to obtain an excellent general education at the High School of Gumbinnen. At the age of 19, he passed his matriculation examination, and entered as a student at the University of Berlin. So far, his attention had in no way been directed to science. Rather had his bent been to the study of languages, and he went up with the intention of reading philosophy, or, as we would say, he entered for the Arts Course. But, in that curriculum, biology is an early and a prominent subject, and the introduction to it was a short course of lectures on the Protozoa. As by a flash of steel, Schaudinn was struck with fascination; he had found his metier; and to the study of the lowly organisms, which he then saw for the first time, he devoted his life.
At Berlin there were unusual opportunities. In Professor Schulze, Schaudinn found a guide who appreciated and loved his brilliant pupil, and who knew well how to direct his work; and he had at his disposal the resources of a thoroughly up-to-date laboratory. Here he worked enthusiastically, as student and assistant director of studies, from 1890 to 1894; here he acquired his unparalleled skill of technique; and here he developed his extraordinary gift of interpretation. In the latter year he graduated, selecting as a subject for his thesis the life- history of the Foraminifera. He was able, to describe many new species, but it was with the relations of the nucleus to the development and morphology of cellular protoplasm that his attention had been chiefly occupied. Although Dimorphism had long been known as a characteristic of Radiolarian life, it was Schaudinn's work at this early period that explained its dependence on nuclear influences, and called attention to their importance and significance. The views which he then formed as to the role of the nucleus proved, indeed, to be the keynote of his future work; and though not fully elaborated until several years later, they are the text of the sermon which he preached throughout his life. Briefly, these views were that in the nucleus of the protozoan cell there are two antagonistic elements—the one somatic, the other reproductive—and that the predominance of either is the characteristic and determinant of differing sex. In a male cell, the somatic or blepharoplastic element is developed at the expense of the female, which atrophies. In a female cell, the reproductive element develops at the expense of the somatic. In sexual fecundation there is a double fusion of antagonistic elements, with the formation of two bodies called by Schaudinn, Synkarions, which themselves again unite, and thus restore nuclear equilibrium. During schizogony, which occurs while the organism is parasitic, and therefore influenced by different extrinsic conditions, nuclear equilibrium is upset, and one element, male or female, becomes predominant, to its own destruction. For, as the process goes on, it enfeebles the progeny, and unless sexual fecundation comes to the rescue as an alternating generation, the organism inevitably perishes. I do not pretend that this is else but the crudest summary of the results of innumerable observations and of a long train of exact mathematical and deductive reasoning; it is cited rather to explain the way in which Schaudinn's attention first became directed to the problems of tropical medicine, and as an example of his generalisations on reproduction, which, begun with the Foraminifera, were ultimately carried step by step through the hsemo-sporidia to the trypanosomes and spirochsetae.
The summer of 1894 Schaudinn spent at the marine biological station at Bergen in Norway, where he published a descriptive list of 139 species of Foraminifera, and on returning to Berlin, at the age of 23, he was appointed chief assistant at the Zoological Institute. Here he worked assiduously for the next four years, augmenting his slender salary by teaching as a privat-docent for the University, and issuing numerous reports containing much new information as to the life-history of Heliozoa, Radiolarians, and Amcfibae. What is regarded by zoologists as one of his best researches, viz., that in which he traced the sexual cycle of the free-living protozoan Trichosphaerium sieboldi through a complete series of alternations, was carried out at this time. During the summer of 1898 Schaudinn, to his great gratification, was sent with his friends, Romer and Friese, an artist, on a scientific expedition to Spitz-bergen. Time is inadequate to follow him to the Arctic zone. It must suffice to say that the trip yielded the keenest enjoyment to the three comrades, and that the scientific results were sufficiently important to justify their publication in book form. Four volumes of this work, Fauna Arctica, by Schaudinn and ROmer, have already appeared.
On his return from the Far North, Schaudinn at once began what is to us the most interesting of all his work—the study of the pathogenic protozoa—by a research, in collaboration with Siedlicki, on the life-history of Coccidia. In the article on Protozoa in AUbutt and Rolleston's System of Medicine, Professor Minchin has given an admirably lucid account of this investigation, and of the development of Coccidium schubergi. The report of this investigation is of peculiar interest to us, not only on account of the extraordinary resemblance of the reproductive cycle of the coccidian to that of the malarial parasite, but also from the fact that it was traced by Schaudinn in the intestinal epithelium of a centipede about the same time that the evolution of the Plasmodium was being followed by Ross in the mosquito. It may be noted, too, that it was at this time that Schaudinn first made use of the terms Schizogony and Sporogony. For his work on the Coccidia, Schaudinn was awarded the Tiedemann prize by the Natural History Society of Frankfurt, and was immediately thereafter called to the Imperial Office of Health in Berlin. Here he was appointed Director of the proposed Institute of Protozoology, for which he drew up a scheme of work, and, in consultation with the architect, suggested plans for the building. Pending the completion of the Institute, Schaudinn, who was now happily married, applied to be transferred to the charge of the Zoological Station at Rovignoon the Adriatic, where he hoped to be able to realise his ambition to repeat the observations that had been made on the tropical protozoan parasites. To his great joy his application was entertained, and he arrived at Rovigno in April, 1901. His first work there was a continuation of his Coccidian observations, this time as parasitic in a warm-blooded animal. He traced the development of Cyclospora caryolytica, the pathogenic organism of a pernicious form of enteritis seen in the mole, through its various stages, and showed that the reproductive phase differed considerably from that of Coccidium schubergi. This research, even more than the others, involved protracted and continuous observation, and it is regarded by zoologists as being, even for Schaudinn, an exceptionally brilliant piece of work, but it is one that is somewhat beyond the scope of this paper. It may be noted, however, that Schaudinn believed that some of the appearances observed by him in this coccidian might explain certain phenomena in the development of tumours.
At the little village of San Michele, Schaudinn found abundant clinical material for his tropical work. One of his first studies there was undertaken to define the exact zoological position of the malarial parasites; and as a result, they were ultimately placed by him in the sub-order Hsemosporidia, and further divided into three species, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariae, and Plasmodium immaculatum. The latter term being, however, found to be preoccupied, was afterwards changed to falciparum, and that classification is now accepted, and is the familiar arrangement which is followed by most authorities. Almost the whole of the malarial work published by Schaudinn referred to the first variety, that of benign tertian. He showed that relapses in this infection were due to parthenogenetic reproduction of macro-gametes which had persisted in the blood, and which, owing to their abundant store of cytoplasm, outlived all other forms. He stated that the familiar signet-ring form was characteristic of future schizonts, that it was due to the formation of a vacuole, that it was designed to increase body surface and, thereby, nutrition, and that no ring stage was observable in future sporonts. The latter, in consequence, grew slowly, and their sex had time to be differentiated, and was determined by the reaction of the host. He further described and drew from life the formation and fertilisation of the gametes, and again showed the extrusion of part of the nucleus and the actual process of fecundation by micro- gametes.
At the same time, he completed the researches he had formerly made on a haeraogregarine of the lizard, Karyolysis lacertarum, and demonstrated that the intermediate host was a tick, Ixodes ricinus, that the larvae were infected by way of the ovary, and that the process was closely allied to those of the organism of spirillar fever in bed-bugs, and of the developmental spirochaetse of Plasmodium ziemanni in the mosquito.
More important still was his work at this time on Amoebiasis. At Rovigno, dysentery was endemic, and Schaudinn's familiarity with the reproduction of the free-living amoebae stood him in good stead in unravelling the problems of the disease. He began at once a series of simultaneous observations on many different specimens, and one of the first results which he obtained, and which, perhaps, could have been secured in no other way than by his own method of work, was the one which solved so many hitherto unexplained difficulties. He showed, as you all know, that two species of amoebae are parasitic in the human colon, which, though similar in appearance, differ widely in their life-cycles, in their reproduction, and in their pathogenicity. The research was productive of results which are now among the most familiar facts in tropical medicine, and it is unnecessary to say more than that, while carrying it out, Schaudinn did not hesitate to repeatedly infect himself by swallowing the developmental cysts both of Entamoeba coli and of Entamoeba histolytica, and that he had, in consequence, two serious attacks of dysentery.
In October, 1903, he published his famous work on the life-cycles and development of Plasmodium ziemanni and Haemo-proteus noctuoe, which are parasitic in the night-owl, and in which he followed the same organism through trypanosome and spirochaeta stages. I understand that some of the statements in this report, which is unusually intricate and complex even for Schaudinn, are still the subject of debate by protozoologists, but there is no diflerence of opinion on the phenomenal power of penetration, and the profound interpretative ability which were displayed by him in his observations and arguments.
In April, 1904, while at Rovigno, and when he was deep in this tropical work, which appealed to him more than anything he had yet undertaken, and where he had now attracted a large following of eager disciples, Schaudinn was suddenly recalled to Berlin, to undertake what the authorities considered more practical duties. But, in the pursuit of knowledge, nothing seemed to come amiss. During the course of an inquiry which he was called on to make as to an outbreak of miners' anaemia in Westphalia, he seized the opportunity to verify Looss's account of the route of transmission of anchylostomum larvae. Soon after this—in March, 1905—the medical world, which for a century had been searching the exudates and granulomata of syphilis for a microorganism, and which in despair had almost abandoned the quest, was electrified by Schaudinn's announcement of the constant presence of a spirochaete in the lesions of that disease. Of this, too, which in future years will rank as, perhaps, the greatest of all his discoveries, it must here suffice to say that Schaudinn, though he fully realised the importance of his communication, was careful to refrain from definitely attributing to the organism an aetiological function, because he was unable to satisfy, at the time, the rigorous demands for logical proof which, in all his work, he imposed on himself. With his mind still hankering after tropical work, Schaudinn, soon after his report on Treponema pallidum had appeared, asked for six months' leave to study at the Hamburg School of Tropical Medicine, and to complete his arrangements for joining Professor Koch in an investigation of trypanosomiasis in East Africa. About this time, too, he received from London what is stated to have been a most alluring offer. Possibly some of those here have fuller information of the circumstances of this temptation than is at my disposal; but, however that may be, the attempt failed. With pardonable gratification, the Continental record states that, after some hesitation, Schaudinn's patriotism triumphed, and even for the great stores of gold which Albion so lavishly bestows on her men of science, he refused to leave his people and his country.
In Hamburg, Schaudinn continued and extended his observations on the relations of spirochsetse and trypanosomes, and further studied transitional forms, such as he had noted in Plasmodium ziemanni, and which he believed to indicate metamorphic phases in the life of various protozoa, but his work was much interrupted by illness. Previously, as we have seen, he had had two attacks of amoebic dysentery; the first he had cured by the free use of calomel, but the second infection was of more malignant type, and it resisted treatment. He, perhaps, regarded it too lightly; at all events, he had no apprehension of the issue; and on the appointment of Director of the Department of Protozoology in the Tropical Institute at Hamburg being offered to him, he definitely accepted it. Before taking up duty which was so completely in accord with his tastes, it was, however, necessary for him to return to Berlin to start the work of the new Institute. There he spent the winter, with but slight improvement in his health, and when he returned to Hamburg in March, 1906, he was still very unwell. From time to time he had severe dysenteric symptoms, with intermittent attacks of fever. On seeking advice he was ordered to take complete rest, and to try the effect of a change; but, having in the meantime been appointed representative of Germany to the International Congress at Lisbon, he persuaded himself that the anticipated benefit might be obtained from that trip. It was not to be. During the return voyage across the Bay of Biscay a peri-rectal abscess pointed and was opened, but with little benefit to his general condition. On arrival at Hamburg, seriously ill and suffering intense pain, Schaudinn was carried to a surgical nursing home. Evidence of deep suppuration round the sigmoid flexure was then discovered, and a further operation was undertaken to evacuate the pus which had formed. But it was too late; septicaemia had set in; the care and skill of his devoted friends and admirers were unavailing, and on June 22nd, 1906, he passed, aged 34 years and nine months.
So died Schaudinn, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, observer in natural science of all time. It is certain that his life was lost as a direct result of his disastrous experiment of self-infection, and it is more than probable that his health was undermined by his almost reckless industry. We are told that he would sit continuously for many days and nights, following at once the life-cycles of a series of different organisms, and that, like the chess-player who simultaneously engages five or six adversaries, he never forgot or confused the issues. He strove to observe life itself, and to work with material that was actually alive, and to that end, whenever it was possible, he discarded stains and dyes. And by this unwearying industry, by this marvellous facility of technique, by this phenomenal power of interpretation, by this almost supernatural scientific flair, Schaudinn won for himself, in the short space of his life, a reputation that, in his own branch of science, is altogether without parallel.
In the preparation of these notes I beg to acknowledge the assistance which I have received from publications by various writers since Schaudinn's death, from the monographs of Professors Minchin and Calkins and Strong, in the later text-books, and more especially from a recent article by Dr. Langeron in Blanchard's Archives de Parasitologie.
The President said the subject of Dr. Carnegie Brown's communication hardly admitted of discussion, but he was sure the Society was exceedingly indebted to him for the resume he had given of the life of Schaudinn, and the account of the work that he had done. "Lives of great men all remind us"—they knew the rest. He wished that in this country some Schaudinn would arise in order that the corresponding Tropical Society in Germany could pronounce so eloquent an eulogium on him as Dr. Carnegie Brown had done upon Fritz Schaudinn.
The President having announced that the next meeting would be held on February 21, the proceedings terminated.