This guy (1745 – 1821) was a German physician and hygienist who wrote about ‘medical police’…a lot

April 8, 2023
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Johann Peter Frank is considered a pioneer in the field of social hygiene and social medicine as well as public health and the public health service and was one of the founders of hygiene as a university subject.  The six-volume (some say six, some say nine) system of a complete medical police is his main work. It took Frank almost four decades to compose it.  It was the most comprehensive attempt to date to regulate all public and private life from a health perspective. Frank’s work on the “medical police” initiated the development of “medicalization”, in which medicine acquired sovereignty over almost all social issues of health and illness.  In the development of “social hygiene” in the early 20th century, Frank’s thoughts and ideas were taken up. 

I thought medical police was a translation error but nope…

  • King LS. A System of Complete Medical Police: Selections From Johann Peter Frank. JAMA. 1976;236(22):2553. doi:10.1001/jama.1976.03270230069047
  • A system of complete medical police. Selections from Johann Peter Frank. Med Hist. 1977 Oct;21(4):464. PMCID: PMC1082123.

Medicinische Policey

This was a comprehensive 9-volume treatise on all aspects of hygiene and public health first published in 1779, and was continued until 1827, six years after Frank’s death. His methodology for public health dealt with subjects such as public sanitation, water supply issues, sexual hygiene, maternal and child welfare, food safety, and prostitution, to name a few.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Peter_Frank (there is, as usual, discrepancy between the English and German Wikipedia pages. This is only one reason why any papers, past or present, remotely funded by public money – and that’s all of them, one way or another – and especially anything concerning some bullshit like “public health” must be made public and easily accessible with no requirement for affiliation or further payment, including purchased credentials. Immediately! There is no way in hell anybody should ever have to pay hundreds of dollars, and likely much more, to read either the monstrosity itself or another’s cherrypicked selections of the monstrosity. If the information is too dangerous for public viewing you may rest assured it is too dangerous to be the foundation of public health. period.)

He stressed the importance of keeping accurate statistical records for hospitals. Reportedly, Frank’s system of record compilation was used by obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweiss (1818–1865) to demonstrate the correlation between puerperal sepsis and unsanitary obstetrical practices. (One of his wives died as a result of what they called childbed fever, followed by the child?) As a director of the Narrenturm, he was also responsible for allowing Franz Joseph Gall (German neuroanatomist, physiologist, pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain and founder of phrenology) access to psychiatric patients in the mid-1780s. Gall was an early and important researcher in his fields. Gall’s study of phrenology helped establish psychology, contributed to the emergence of the naturalistic approach to the study of man, and played an important part in the development of evolutionist theories, anthropology, and sociology.

  • Graham, Patrick. (2001) Phrenology [videorecording (DVD)] : revealing the mysteries of the mind . Richmond Hill, Ont. : American Home Treasures. ISBN 0-7792-5135-0
  • Livianos-Aldana, Lorenzo; Rojo-Moreno, Luis; Sierra-SanMiguel, Pilar (2007). “Gall and the phrenological movement”. The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 164(3)

Frank is credited with being the first physician to describe clinical differences between diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus.

After working as a country doctor in Rodalben, Bitsch , Zaisenhausen and Bruchsal , Frank became personal physician to the Prince-Bishop of Speyer in 1774 . He was later put in charge of an institution in Deidesheim and a hospital in Bruchsal, where he set up a school for surgeons. He married in 1767, his wife Katharine died of childbed fever, and their son six months later. In 1770 he married Marianne Wittlinsbach, with whom he had two sons, including Joseph Frank (1771–1842), and a daughter. By a margravial decree of July 11, 1772, Frank was appointed “master midwife and accoucheur” (this actually translated as landacchoucheur which spellcheck doesn’t like and google doesn’t quickly explain outside of accoucheur. Midwife page explains: Men rarely practice midwifery for cultural and historical reasons. In ancient Greece, midwives were required by law to have given birth themselves, which prevented men from joining their ranks. In 17th century Europe, some barber surgeons, all of whom were male, specialized in births, especially births requiring the use of surgical instruments. This eventually developed into a professional split, with women serving as midwives and men becoming obstetricians. Men who work as midwives are called midwives (or male midwives, if it is necessary to identify them further) or accoucheurs; the term midhusband (based on a misunderstanding of the etymology of midwife) is occasionally encountered, mostly as a joke. In previous centuries, they were called man-midwives in English. The word derives from Old English mid, “with”, and wif, “woman”, and thus originally meant “with-woman”, that is, the woman who is with the person who is giving birth. The term “male midwife” is common parlance when referring to male gendered people who work as midwives.) Frank’s teachers in the field of obstetrics were the Heidelberg doctor Franz Gabriel Schönmetzel (1736-1785) and in Strasbourg the famous obstetric school, Johann Jakob Frieds (1689-1769). 

  • Pilkenton, Deanna; Schorn, Mavis N (February 2008). “Midwifery: A career for men in nursing”. Men in Nursing. doi:10.1097/01.MIN.0000310888.82818.15. S2CID 214982676.
  • “Midwife: Word History”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2015. Archived from the original on 21 September 2015.
  • Harper, Douglas. “midwife”. The Online Etymological Dictionary. Archived from the original on 15 September 2017. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
  • Kurt Baumann: Palatinate life pictures , third volume, 1977, p. 145 ff.
  • Werner E. Gerabek: Frank, Joseph. In: Encyclopedia of Medical History. 2005, p. 421.
  • Peter Schneck : Johann Peter Frank (1745-1821) and midwifery in the 18th century. In: The health professions. 25th year, issue 3, (Springer Verlag Berlin) 1973, pp. 85–88.

In 1779, Frank published the first of six volumes of his major work, System of a Complete Medical Police . In the section “On the restoration of gymnastics and the same advantages in public education” he presented the health, ethical and cultural importance as well as the personality-forming function of physical exercise and explained a number of useful exercises. These include “walking, hiking, running, jumping, throwing, ice skating, sledding, ball games, fencing, horseback riding, dancing, archery, cold bathing, swimming, stilt walking, and rock climbing.” Restoration? What does that mean?

After Frank took on a teaching position in Göttingen in 1784, he became a professor at the Medical Clinic in Pavia (1785?) and Director General of Medicine in Austrian Lombardy. As a professor at the Vienna General Hospital in 1795, Frank began fundamentally modernizing the institute. In 1804 he was appointed to the Imperial University of Vilnius with his son Josef Frank , where he also introduced modern structures and curricula. Finally, from 1807 to 1808, Frank was personal physician to the Russian Tsar Alexander I at the court in Saint Petersburg . On December 19, 1814 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences in Paris.  Frank died in Vienna in 1821 as a result of a stroke and rests in a Grave of honor in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 32 A, number 3).

From 1779 to 1819, Johann Peter Frank summarized the entire hygienic and socio-medical reform efforts of his time in a multi-volume Medicinische Policey . In 1800, Franz Anton Mai published proposals for social hygiene legislation. 

Franz Anton Mai is another lunatic who will require a separate page. Briefly, available data suggests he at one time “followed the medical concept of illness developed by the Scottish physician John Brown (1735–1788), i.e. Brownianism .  Mai (whose real name is Maggio?) spoke of “Master Brown” as the “great medical church light” or also the “reformer of practical medicine.” While pretending to obstetrics, Mai “found that many of the unmarried pregnant women were suffering from the “pleasure plague”, i.e. syphilis. He looked for ways to prevent further spread.”  Sure he did. “A man committed to the social hardship of his time, he became a Physicus at the Mannheim penitentiary and orphanage, a Medical Councilor with a seat and a vote in the Electoral Collegium Medicum, founded a boarding house for the poor, and proved to be helpful to poor artisans and schoolchildren alike. He was also a theater doctor” (aren’t they all?). This list is long. If they were vulnerable, and most were, this asshole had access. period. Not bad for “the son of a chimney sweep” but extremely bad and I dare say devastating for all mankind…humankind, if you prefer. And still celebrated all over the “civilized world.”

I can’t even continue trying to edit this post at this time. This page is a mess. This entire field (which has yet to eradicate a single disorder from the earth – physical, mental, social or wtf ) and anything touching it is a mess so I’m not going to fret about that too much. I have to move along. I have been sitting on this for at least three days trying to digest this nonsense in effort to make sure I am not being hasty in early assessments and I’m no more at peace with any of it. So that’s that. Let me end with something nice or at least not so judgmental…I’m sure this asshole was not the worst in his field, then or now. That’s the best I can do at this time.

Other and More or Less Redundant Biographical information

Johann Peter Frank was born in Rodalben. His first studies were in theology. He then studied medicine at the Universities of Strasbourg and Heidelberg, and earned his medical doctorate in 1766. He practiced medicine in Bruchsal and elsewhere for a time, and then became physician to the prince-bishop of Speyer. He was appointed professor of physiology and medical policy at the University of Göttingen in 1784, but the next year he went to Italy for his health and joined the faculty of the University of Pavia, where he succeeded Samuel-Auguste Tissot teaching clinical medicine (1785-1795).

He was appointed sanitary inspector general of Lombardy, and introduced reforms in medical instruction and practice. The rank of councillor was conferred on him by the king of England, and later by the emperor of Austria, who employed him in 1795 for the regulation of the sanitary service of the army and as director general of the principal hospital of Vienna.

In 1804, he went to Vilnius University as professor of clinical medicine, and then for a period of time (1805–1808), he was personal physician to Czar Alexander I, and also professor at the medical and surgical academy of St. Petersburg. In 1808, he returned to Vienna, where he was professor of medicine at the University of Vienna, as well as director of the Allegemeines Krankenhaus.

He died in Vienna.

Family

His son Joseph Frank was a noted physician. He assisted his father in Pavia and Vienna, and became in 1804 a professor of pathology at Vilnius University. At Vilnius he founded a vaccination institute (1808), a maternity institute (1809) and an out-patients’ clinic (1807). The Vilnius Medical Society was founded on his initiative. He retired in 1824 on account of a disease of the eyes, now thought to be pink eye. He was one of the more influential advocates of the Brunonian system of physic, and published “Grundriss der Pathologie nach den Gesetzen der Erregungstheorie” (Vienna, 1803). As his career progressed, however, he became highly critical of Brunonianism. His “Praxeos Medicæ Universæ Præcepta” (Leipzig, second edition, 1826–43) has been translated into German (9 volumes, 1828–43) and French.

Johann Peter Frank Medal

The Johann Peter Frank Medal is the highest award from the Federal Association of Physicians in the Public Health Service (BVÖGD) for special services to the public health system in the Federal Republic of Germany. It has been awarded at the association’s annual national congress since 1972.

Miscellaneous

Frank’s name features on the Frieze of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Twenty-three names of public health and tropical medicine pioneers were chosen to feature on the School building in Keppel Street when it was constructed in 1926.

  • “Behind the Frieze”. LSHTM. Archived from the original on 22 February 2017. Retrieved 21 February 2017.

The Frank – van Swieten Lectures, an international course about strategic information management in hospitals, that is organised by TU Braunschweig, University of Amsterdam, University of Heidelberg, UMIT at Hall near Innsbruck, Fachhochschule Heilbronn and Leipzig University, is named after him.

Texts (Selection) 

See also

References

  • Paul Diepgen , Heinz Goerke : Aschoff : Brief overview table on the history of medicine. 7th revised edition. Springer, Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg 1960, p. 34.
  • Manfred Stürzbecher : Police, medical. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Encyclopedia of Medical History. De Gruyter, Berlin/ New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , pp. 1174–1175, here: p. 1174.
  • “Behind the Frieze”. LSHTM. Archived from the original on 22 February 2017. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
  • Enotes Archived 2011-05-27 at the Wayback Machine Public Health Encyclopedia
  • The History of Clinical Endocrinology by Victor Cornelius Medvei
  • This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Ripley, George; Dana, Charles A., eds. (1879). “Frank. I. Johann Peter” . The American Cyclopædia.
  • Paolo Mazzarello. “A brief historical profile of Pavia medicine”. Archived from the original on 12 July 2015. Retrieved 7 May 2015.

Literature

Web Links

Commons : Johann Peter Frank  – Collection of images, videos and audio files

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