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Hans Joachim Scherer
German physician, born May 14, 1906, Bromberg, Western Prussia; died April 16, 1945, Landshut, Bavaria.
Associated eponyms:
Van Bogaert-Scherer-Epstein syndrome
A familial disorder of metabolism.
Biography:
Hans-Joachim Scherer was among the most creative and productive neuropathologists of his time. Working as a political refugee in Antwerp (Belgium) during 1934-41, he published landmark studies on the morphology and biology of malignant gliomas, and was the first to clearly distinguish primary and secondary glioblastomas, and growth patterns reflecting the invasion of pre-existing brain tissue (secondary structures). Scherer was a controversial personality, who at the end of World War II became entangled in the Nazi euthanasia programme.
He studied medicine in Munich, where he worked in the Institute of Pathology. In 1930, he published his medical dissertation on the subject of giant foldings of the gastric mucosa. In the same year, he started his neuropathological training with Walther Spielmeyer (1879-1935) at the German Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, with financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
In July 1931, he moved to the Institute of Pathology of the University Hospital Charité in Berlin to work with the pathologist Robert Rössle (1876-1956). In August 1933, a few months after Hitler came to power, Scherer was arrested by the Gestapo (the secret police), together with his colleagues Leonid Doljanski and Henry Roback. After a few days he was released but fled from Germany, first to Paris, then to Antwerp, where Ludo van Bogaert (1897-1989) offered him a position as chief of laboratory at the Bunge Institute.
Scherer was not a grateful man. After the German invasion of Belgium, he made an attempt to push professor van Bogaert out of the position of director of the Bunge Institute – in order to assume the position for himself. Following an intervention by the German neuropathologist Hugo Spatz (1888-1969), this failed. Van Bogaert dismissed Scherer.
Scherer then worked in Ghent until 1941, when the German military command ordered him to return to Germany. He took up a position at the Neurological Institute in Breslau, Silesia, which is now a part of Poland.
In his laboratory in Breslau, Scherer carried out neuropathological analyses on the central nervous system of more than 300 Polish and German children who had been euthanized in the mental hospital Loben / Lubliniecz near Breslau. He was thus one of several German neuropathologists who became accomplices of this murderous program. Among the others were Berthold Ostertag (1895-1975), Hugo Spatz and Julius Hallervorden (1882-1965).
Scherer died on April 16, 1945, in a bomb attack by the allied forces on the train station in Landshut, Bavaria, at the age of only 39 years. He was survived by his Belgian wife and a daughter.
We thank Michel Philippart for information submitted.
Bibliography:
- Beitrag zur Frage des experimentellen Hyperfeminismus.
Written with Ernst Scharrer (1905-1965).
Zeitschrift für vergleichende Physiologie, Berlin, 1929, 8: 749-760.
- Beiträge zur pathologischen Anatomie des Kleinhirns. I. Mitteilung. Die lokalen Veränderungen der Kleinhirnrinde.
Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, Berlin, 1931, 136: 559-595.
- Beiträge zur pathologischen Anatomie des Kleinhirns. II. Mitteilung. Die Erkrankung des Kleinhirns und seiner Kerne, insbesondere des Nucleus dentatus.
Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1932, 139: 337-368.
- Beiträge zur pathologischen Anatomie des Kleinhirns. III. Mitteilung. Genuine Kleinhirnatrophien.
Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1933, 145: 335-405.
- Die Bedeutung des Mesenchyms in Gliomen.
Virchows Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, Berlin, 1933, 291: 321-340.
- Beitrag zur Differentialdiagnose neurogener Geschwülste.
Virchows Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, 1934, 292: 479-553.
- Untersuchungen über den geweblichen Aufbau der Geschwülste des peripheren Nervensystems.
Virchows Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, 1934, 292: 479-553.
- Zur Differentialdiagnose der intracerebralen ("zentralen") Neurinome.
Virchows Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, 1934, 292: 554-561.
- Gliomstudien I. Problemstellung, Methodik.
Virchows Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, 1935, 294: 790-794.
- Gliomstudien III. Angioplastische Gliome.
Virchows Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin, 1935, 294: 823-886.
- II. Etude sur les gliomes. Comportement des différents gliomes vis-à-vis des cellules ganglionaires.
Bulletin de l'Association française pour l'étude du cancer, Paris, 1936, 25: 470-493.
- Structural development in gliomas.
The American Journal of Cancer, Lancaster, Pa, 1938, 34: 333-351.
- Cerebral astroytomas and their derivatives.
The American Journal of Cancer, 1940, 40: 159-198.
- The forms of growth in gliomas and their practical significance.
Brain, Oxford, UK, 1940, 63: 1-35.
- The pathology of cerebral gliomas. A critical review.
Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, London, 1940, 3: 147-177.
- Vergleichende Pathologie des Nervensystems der Säugetiere.
G. Thieme Verlag, Leipzig, 1944.
- Sur une forme particulière de gliomatose périvasculaire.
Written with Jacques De Busscher (1902-1966).
Journal belge de neurologie et de psychiatrie, Bruxelles, 1937, 37: 299-310.
Biographical:
- Jürgen Pfeiffer and Paul Kleihues:
Hans-Joachim Scherer (906-1945), piooneer in Glioma research.
Brain pathology, 1999, 9: 241-245.
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