Bruno Mendel, 1897-1959

Abstract

Bruno Mendel, who died on 23 August 1959 in his home in Bussum, Holland, was elected to the Royal Society in 1957. He was born in Essen, Germany, on 3 November 1897. He came from a Jewish family. His father, Felix Mendel, was a physician who, in spite of his large practice, devoted much of his time to scientific problems and in the years between 1887 and 1922 published over fifty papers, mainly on therapeutic subjects. It is interesting to recall that Bruno Mendel’s father introduced the perlingual application of drugs and was one of the first doctors in Germany to advocate intravenous injections as a simple, effective and safe procedure which ought to be widely used by the general practitioner. ‘I made over 2000 intravenous injections without a single adverse effect’ he could write in 1903 in one of the fifteen papers he published on the advantage of injecting intravenously various drugs in different diseases. He was one of the first to recognize the therapeutic value of a diet low in salt and he re-introduced the use of squill for certain cases of cardiac failure. This remedy had been known for centuries but, due to the introduction of Folia Digitalis by Whitteridge, had been neglected and was in danger of being forgotten. Bruno Mendel inherited his keen scientific interest from his father: they had much in common. His father was a practising physician but with a strong scientific bias. Bruno Mendel was a scientist who lived with and for his experiments, yet always felt himself to be a physician. Although he worked on purely biochemical or physiological problems, he saw them in association with the general clinical aspect. Whenever he discussed the results of his latest experiments— and this he loved to do— he brought up the question of their ultimate clinical and therapeutic value.