Arthur Nicolaier (4 February 1862 in Cosel, Upper Silesia, Prussia – 28 August 1942 in Berlin) was a

German Jew The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321 CE, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish commu ...

ish

internist Internal medicine, also known as general medicine in Commonwealth nations, is a medical specialty for medical doctors focused on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases in adults. Its namesake stems from "treatment of diseases of th ...

. Most famous for his work on discovering a cure for

tetanus Tetanus (), also known as lockjaw, is a bacterial infection caused by ''Clostridium tetani'' and characterized by muscle spasms. In the most common type, the spasms begin in the jaw and then progress to the rest of the body. Each spasm usually l ...

which was an extremely fatal disease if it wasn't treated in the correct way. "Beiträge zur Aetiologie des Wundstarrkrampfes" (Contributions to the etiology of tetanus). He was a senior physician at the Göttingen university hospital 1897–1900 and then moved to Berlin. In 1921, he was appointed as an extraordinary professor of internal medicine at

Charité The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Charité – Berlin University of Medicine; ) is Europe's List of hospitals by capacity, largest university hospital, affiliated with Humboldt University of Berlin, Humboldt University and the Free ...

. He was removed from office in 1933 when the Nazis passed

laws Law is a set of rules that are created and are law enforcement, enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a Socia ...

that made it illegal for Jews to be civil servants. He committed suicide in 1942 when he learned that he was about to be deported to the

Theresienstadt concentration camp Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ( German-occupied Czechoslovakia). Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination c ...

Scientific contributions

As an assistant to

Carl Flügge Carl Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Flügge (12 September 1847 – 10 December 1923) was a German bacteriologist and hygienist. His finding that pathogens were present in expiratory droplets, the eponymous Flügge droplets, laid the foundations for th ...

in Göttingen, Nicolaier discovered ''

Clostridium tetani ''Clostridium tetani'' is a common soil bacterium and the causative agent of tetanus. Vegetative cells of ''Clostridium tetani'' are usually rod-shaped and up to 2.5 μm long, but they become enlarged and tennis racket- or drumstick-shaped wh ...

'', the bacterium that causes tetanus, in 1884. He was the first to use hexamethylentetramin ( Urotropin) for treating urinary infections.Dr. Wilhelm Foerst (Hrsg.): Ullmanns Encyklopädie der technischen Chemie. Urban & Schwarzberg München-Berlin 1954, 3. Aufl. Bd. 5 S.229.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nicolaier, Arthur 1862 births 1942 suicides 1942 deaths 19th-century German Jews Tetanus Suicides by Jews during the Holocaust German Jews who died in the Holocaust German internists Suicides in Germany