Famous Scientist Adalbert Czerny

Adalbert Czerny born on 25 March 1863 – 3 October 1941. He was an Austrian pediatrician and is considered as an co-founder of modern pediatrics. To honor his devotions and contributions Several children's diseases were named after him.

Early Life:

As a son of a railway engineer, Czerny grew up in Vienna and in Pilsen , where he passed his Abitur exam in 1882. He took up medical studies at the German Charles University in Prague. He graduated with his doctoral thesis on a kidney disease in 1888 and took up clinical work as an assistant to Alois Epstein (1849–1918) at the "Findelanstalt" (hospital for foundlings), which was part of the Prague University Hospital.

In 1906 he was offered a position as full professor for pediatrics in Munich, but he declined it and as a reward was made personal full professor at the Breslau University including a considerable raise of his salary.

When he was offered the chair of pediatrics in the new Children's Hospital in Strassburg in 1910 he accepted and worked there until 1913, when he became the successor of Otto Heubner as full professor for pediatrics at the Berlin Charité. For the next 19 years he worked there and – among other achievements – founded the international School of Pediatrics. As professor emeritus he accepted a chair for pediatrics at the Medical Academy in Düsseldorf, where he temporarily was head of the local Children's Hospital from 1934 to 1936.

Achievements:

Czerny founded a school and it mainly concerned with nutrition physiology and metabolic pathology of neonates. During his time of work at the Berlin University Children's Hospital he carried on with research work on infant mortality, as it had already been started by Heubner and gave it a scientific foundation. Together with his pupil and colleague Arthur Keller (1868–1934) he summarized the results of his Breslau work in 1906 in a two-volume manual "Des Kindes Ernährung, Ernährungsstörungen und Ernährungstherapie" (Children's nutrition, nutritional disturbance and therapeutic nutrition) – among experts simply known as the „Czerny–Keller“. Further editions were published in 1917 and 1928.

This work has basically determined the teaching of nutrition in pediatrics and as a result influenced the development of pediatrics itself up to the present. The term disorder of nutrition, which Czerny used, showed the relation between nutrition on the one and disease on the other hand. Czerny distinguished three groups of damages i. e. (a) due to nutrition, (b) due to infections and (c) due to physical constitution. A second emphasis in his research work was the correlation between nutritional disturbance and the behaviour of the child. His repeatedly re-edited collection of lectures of 1908 "Der Arzt als Erzieher" ("The physician as an educator") shows this approach in its title.

Discoveries:

He discovered Children's diseases such as nutritional anemia in neonates (Czerny anemia), lymphatic−exudative diathesis (Czerny diathesis), a clinical entity, which Czerny clearly distinguished from scrofula and consequently from tuberculosis  What he described is an individual disposition to increased sensitivity of the skin and the mucus. paradoxical respiration (Czerny respiration, German: Czerny-Atmung).