Gustav Ricker

Gustav Wilhelm August Josef Ricker (1870 to 1948) was a German physician and pathologist, born in Hadamar, Hesse-Nassau, on 2 November 1870 and dead on 23 September 1948. He studied philosophy and medicine at several universities and earned his doctorate in 1893 at the University of Berlin. He received his habilitation at the University of Rostock in 1897 under Albert Thierfelder, and from 1906 until 1933 he headed pathology at the city hospitals of Altstadt and Sudenburg in Magdeburg, afterwards working as a private scholar in Berlin and Dresden. He is remembered for his Stufengesetz, the law of stages, which relates the intensity of neural stimulation to blood flow in capillaries, and for Relationspathologie, or relational pathology, which holds that the root of pathological processes is a neural process and not a cellular one. Magdeburg has a street and a hospital named in his honor, and his publications include Entwurf einer Relationspathologie in 1905.