[Steadiness and progress. Medicine in Würzburg in the mirror of the centuries - a contribution to the foundation of the University of Würzburg 600 years ago].

In the year 1402 one of the first German universities was founded by bishop Johann von Egloffstein, but it had last in its full composition for only a few decades. Nevertheless, the 600th anniversary has a great importance, because in the 16th century, during the second foundation, there was an adequate tradition of university in Würzburg to lean on and go back to.Although, in a medical-history view, in 1402 this university had been without a greater importance, the medicine in Würzburg in the Middle Ages and the Early modern Times had been on a high level, what is shown by representatives like Ortolf von Baierland (13th century) and Berthold Blumentrost (14th century) or by documents like the 'Würzburger Wundarznei' at the end of the 15th century and the 'Nüttzlicher Bericht' by Walther Hermann Ryff, printed 1548 in Würzburg, as one of the first dental mongraphies.A lasting success was finally the university opened in the year 1582. In 1575/6 bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn had reached, using the traditions of the university of 1402, a new privilege by the pope and the emperor. The medical faculty which was functional deeply connected with the Juliusspital as a kind of hospital right from the beginning, was determined by Wilhelm Schefferlein, Gottfriedt van der Steighe and Adriaen van Roomen. In the beginning of the 17th century the medical faculty turned pale, but two representatives of the philosophic faculty, Athanasius Kircher and Caspar Schott, accomplished remarkable outcomes in medical fields. Heavily stricken by the Thirty Years' War the medicine at the University of Würzburg was changed by the prince-bishops to the model of the University of Leiden, in order to improve the feeble position of the medical faculty. After not being successful in the beginning, the foundation of the blossom and of its worldwide importance had been laid in the last third of the 18th century. Karl Kaspar Siebold had, with the help of some of his fellows, students, and his family (like his sons Johann Barthel and Adadam Elias von Siebold), reorganized the medical faculty, which had brought her in the byname 'Academia Sieboldiana". In the beginning of the 19th century the recovery of the faculty moved on more and more: OUtstanding representatives like Ignaz Döllinger, Johann Lukas Schoenlein and Franz von Rinecker founded by their great medical-scientific and organizational achievements, the high reputation of the medical faculty of Würzburg. Especially in the second half of the 19th century the University of Würzburg was in a leading position in a lot of traditional disciplines and in the developing and establishing of new medical fields, shown by names like Franz Kiwisch Ritter von Rotterau and Friedrich Wilhelm Scanzoni von Lichtenfels, Cajetan von Textor and Wenzel von Linhart, Rudolf Virchow, Albert Kölliker, Franz von Leydig, Carl Joseph von Ringelmann, Johann Joseph von Scherer, Johann Georg Heine, Adolf Fick or Carl Gerhardt.