Albert Fraenkel

Julius Albert Fraenkel was a German physician, born in 1864 in Mußbach an der Weinstraße to a Jewish merchant and dying in 1938. He studied medicine in Munich and Strasbourg and at first practiced internal medicine and obstetrics, then turned to diseases of the lungs after suffering from tuberculosis himself, and founded a tuberculosis sanatorium at Badenweiler in the Black Forest. He helped establish Streptococcus pneumoniae as a cause of bacterial pneumonia and championed intravenous ouabain, or g-Strophanthin, for heart failure, a practice some German practitioners still advocate. The Albert Fraenkel award is given to German-speaking cardiologists who have excelled in the field. After the rise of Adolf Hitler he lost his professorship at Heidelberg in 1933, and his license to practice medicine was revoked in 1938, three months before his death.