SCHEISSENHAUSEN Gustav Adolph (9th September 1864 – 8th
June 1945)
German metabolic physician, after whom Scheissenhausen’s
Dysfunction is
named.
Gustav Adolph Scheissenhausen was born in Marktbreit, Bavaria on 8th
June 1864 where his father was a night soil engineer and his mother a
haus frau.
Coincidentally, Marktbreit was the home town of Alois Altzheimer (14
June 1864 – 19 December 1915). (Both Scheissenhausen and Altzheimer were distantly
related to Karl
Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr (Baron) von Münchhausen.)
The two famous physicians were in the same class at the same school and
entered the same university (Wurzburg) to study medicine,
Scheissenhausen becoming a metabolic physician and Altzheimer a
neurologist.
In 1917, while the country was in the grip of what would 30 years later become
known as the First World War, Dr. Scheissenhausen observed that an
increasing number of German men and women were being referred to him
with a mysterious illness that included the symptoms of lethargy,
headaches, insomnia, belly ache, obesity and running out of puff when
gardening. In a speech given to the Deutsche Institut für Metabolische
Dysfunktion on 18th April 1922, he was able to identify for the first
time the pathology and the clinical symptoms of what would many years
later become
Scheissenhausen’s Dysfunction.
Despite the rise of Nazism, which curtailed all medical research
expenditure, (except that related to eugenics) Scheissenhausen pressed on, attending to patients, making
observations, filling filing cabinets with notes and writing articles
about the mysterious syndrome that few people had the time or
inclination to
read in the few German medical journals that were being published at
that time.
Eventually on 8th of June 1945 he succumbed to the dysfunction for
which he would later become famous.
It was not until 2011 that German born Australian metabolic health
researcher, Frederich Nurk, on holidays in Europe and having coffee and
kuchen at the Scheissenhausen Institute in Marktbriet had a chance
encounter with Scheissenhausen’s son Hans, that led to the filing
cabinets containing Scheissenhausen’s life's work.
The rest, as they say, is history.
After a short period of intensive
research as visiting fellow at the Australian Institute for Metabolic
Health Studies in Iron Knob, South Australia, and following a presentation at the Las
Vagus International Round Table on Metabolic Health in 2014, the International Round Table officially
elevated what Scheissenhausen himself had coined Scheissenhausen’s Syndrome to Scheissenhausen’s
Dysfunction.
