Franz Loogen
He is a pioneer of cardiac catheterization and is considered the founding father of cardiology as an independent specialty of internal medicine in Germany.
After graduating from the Kaiser-Karls-Gymnasium in Aachen in 1937, Loogen studied human medicine in Cologne, where he took his medical examination in 1939.
[4] A leave of absence to finish his medical studies in Munich saved his life, as his unit was destroyed near Leningrad shortly after his return from Russia.
[5][6] At the University of Munich, Loogen continued his studies from the summer semester of 1942 and passed the state examination in medicine on 13 July 1944, as well as receiving his doctorate with the thesis "Über den sog.
[4] In September 1944, while on home leave, Loogen was taken first as an American and then as a British prisoner of war, from which he was not released until January 1948.
During this time, he met an English doctor of German origin who (then illegally) provided him with penicilline as early as 1946, with which Loogen was able to successfully treat fellow prisoners suffering from endocarditis.
[5] 1954: Publication of the first German monograph on cardiac catheterization,[8] dedicated to the later Nobel Prize winner Werner Forßmann, which became the "bible" of every interventional cardiologist.
[5] 1955: Franz Grosse-Brockhoff, director of the 1st Medical Clinic, officially appoints Loogen to head the cardiology working group.
Loogen takes over the newly created extraordinary - and in the Federal Republic of Germany first - chair for "Internal Medicine, especially Cardiology" in Düsseldorf.
[5][14] Loogen established the first independent department of cardiology[13] and collaborated early on with the (Düsseldorf) cardiac surgeons, especially Ernst Derra and Wolfgang Bircks.
[14] With a sure instinct for world politics, he won the agreement of representatives of the then Eastern Bloc countries and in particular the Soviet Society of Cardiology - long before the fall of the Berlin Wall - to hold the XII World Congress of Cardiology, organised by the ISFC, in (West) Berlin in 1994.
His "school" produced several generations of medical specialists, a number of chief physicians and numerous full professors at other universities.
[4][6] When at the beginning of the 1970s a split between "theoreticians" and clinicians threatened in the German Society for Circulatory Research, long dominated by basic researchers,[17][21] as a result of the rapid development of clinical cardiology, Loogen averted this, according to the assessment of the long-time DGK executive director Gunther Arnold,[16] by introducing - in addition to the traditional (basic) scientific annual meeting in Bad Nauheim (today in Mannheim) - the clinically oriented autumn meeting, at which "only clinicians should have their say and no fundamental questions should be discussed".
[14][17][21] During his editorship, Loogen worked to ensure that the Zeitschrift für Kardiologie continued to appear in German - contrary to the prevailing trend among other medical journals[22] - so as not to exclude doctors interested in cardiology in East Germany, who were less familiar with English at the time, from the readership.
During this period he played a total of ten point games in the Gauliga Südbayern and scored two goals.
[25] When allegations arose in the early 2000s that the hepatitis illness that occurred in a large part of the winning team shortly after the World Cup match was connected to banned doping, Loogen testified in a television programme in 2004 that the players had only received vitamin C injections.
He conceded that the pathogen could have been transmitted from one already infected player to the others during the injection,[27] especially since there were no disposable syringes in 1954 and the hepatitis virus, about which little was known at the time, can survive ordinary sterilization.
