Ludwig Traube (physician)

Ludwig Traube (12 January 1818 in Ratibor, Silesia, now Racibórz, Poland – 11 April 1876 in Berlin) was a German physician and co-founder of the experimental pathology in Germany.

In 1840 he received his doctorate („Specimina nonnulla physiologica et pathologica“), a work about pulmonary emphysema.

Then he moved to Vienna to broaden his knowledge (Baron Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878) und Joseph Škoda (1805–1881).

His nephews Wilhelm Traube (chemist, 1866–1942) and Albert Fraenkel (physician, 1848–1916) belong also to the scholars-family Traube-Litten-Fraenkel.

One of his daughters was Margarete Traube, a chemist and activist, married firstly to the physiologist and histologist Franz Christian Boll and secondly to the Italian engineer and politician Guglielmo Mengarini.

Ludwig Traube earned great fame and honours by his establishing experimental pathophysiological research in Germany (e.g. he did animal experiments in the 1840s in his Berlin flat in the Oranienburger Str.)

He investigated the pathophysiology of respiration and the regulation of the body temperature, and gave a scientific basis to digitalis therapy.