Paul Clemens von Baumgarten

Biography of Paul Clemens von Baumgarten

Paul Clemens von Baumgarten, the son of a physician, was a pupil of Christian Wilhelm Braune (1831-1892) and Ernst Leberecht Wagner (1829-1888) in Leipzig, and Ernst Neumann (1834-1918) in Königsberg. He received his doctorate in Leipzig on August 22, 1873. That year he became an assistant at the anatomical institute in Leipzig under Wilhelm His (1831-1904) and Wilhelm Braune, from 1874 to 1889 prosector of the pathological-anatomical institute in Königsberg with Ernst Neumann. He became Privatdozent of pathological anatomy at the University of Königsberg in 1877, was appointed extraordinary professor of the same discipline in 1881, and was examinator for hygiene at that university from 1888. In 1889 he was called to the University of Tübingen as full professor of pathological anatomy and general pathology, while also representing the subject of bacteriology. He remained here for the rest of his career.

Baumgarten described the tubercle bacillus in 1882, the same year as Koch - and independent of him. Based on numerous experimental investigations he refuted Metchnikoff’s theory of phagocytes, and he established that neither Robert Koch’s new or old method had any curative effect on tubercles inoculated into rabbits or guinea pigs. His textbook of pathological mucology is the first attempt to develop the pathogenesis of infectious diseases and pathological histology based on the modern doctrine of pathogenous microorganisms.

From 1885 to 1917 Baumgarten published the Jahresberichte über die Fortschritte in der Lehre von den pathogenen Organismen, and from 1889 occasioned the publication of 9 volumes of: Arbeiten auf dem Gebiete der pathogenen Anatomie und Bakteriologie.