Erich Hoffmann

Erich Hoffmann was a German dermatologist, born in Witzmitz in Pomerania in 1868, who died in 1959. He studied medicine at the Berlin Military Academy and later held professorships at the universities of Halle and Bonn. He is remembered for his work with the zoologist Fritz Schaudinn at the Charite clinic in Berlin, where in 1905 the two men discovered the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis, Treponema pallidum, which they first called Spirochaeta pallida. They took the organism from a papule in the vulva of a woman with secondary syphilis and reported it in a short preliminary treatise. Hoffmann left Germany during the National Socialist era, returned to Bonn after the war and set up a laboratory there, and in the late 1940s published two books about his life in medicine.