Kapronczay Károly szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 194-195. (Budapest, 2006)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - ELEK, Gábor - MÜLLER, Miklós: Ervin Bauer as pathologist

Table 2. Echoes of Bauer

's papers on pathology in Part III of the Grundprinzipien (The application of the principles in pathology). Pars placed in parentheses were abbreviated for better comprehension Quote from an original paper Year and page In Part ill of the Grundprinzipien Page Increased level of uric acid due to functional disturbances of the kidneys leads to a compensatory hypertrophy of the (adrenal) cortex 1918 p. 15 ...a loss of a regulatory process can disclose the role of a damaged organ or tissue in the regulatory function in question... 62 Accordingly we can interpret the increased presence of silver grains as signs of a purine degeneration. 1920a p. 5 32 When regulatory processes no longer eliminate the products of degradation, we speak of degeneration. 66 The "toxin" in typhus exanthematicus damages ...all small arteries in the organism leading to proliferation of the endothelium, their degenerative processes or their necrosis and desquamation. 1916a p. 542 We use the term inflammation for those adaptive processes of the organisms that arise necessarily due to the changed and not regulatory processes in cells undergoing degeneration. 69 The tumor did not developed from misplaced connective tissue or muscularis but arose ...around the capillaries. 1917 p. 40 We come to the conclusion that the cause of tumor formation is not due to the disturbance in a regulatory process always functioning in the organism but due to the disturbance of a regulatory adaptive process, the regeneration, that is elicited and determined by the decomposition of tissues and cells. 72 It is in fact not very likely that in the relatively few similar cases genetic differences were present. 1914 p. 640 (it is not correct to say that)... "the main aspect of tumor formation is to be found in the tumor cells themselves. " 73 According to Bauer, the fundamental characteristic of living organisms is that they use all free energy of their nutrients to support a nonequilbrium state against its environment. All life phenomena serve this purpose, thus they are regulatory. Disease is a disturbance in regulation, when the energy taken up from the environment, or a part of it, is not used to maintain the nonequilibrium state. According to Bauer, disease can only be elicited by external influence. This was the basis of his views on tumor formation (see last two rows of Table 2). This explains also his negative opininon on the significance of genetics. The Grundprinzipien (Bauer 1920c) is a delightful reading for a biologist or medical scientist. It elevates our views of medicine to philosophical hights. The work eschewes almost entirely the errors due to obsolete data that abound in the Theoretical Biology (Bauer 1935) and in his other articles. Although this work was published in Germany and not in the