Читать книгу Nobel - Michael Worek - Страница 44

Robert Bárány (1876–1936)

1914 Physiology or Medicine

For his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus.

Robert Bárány was born in Vienna, Austria, and was the eldest of six children. His father managed an estate and his mother, the daughter of a well-known Prague scientist, led the intellectual life of the family. While still young, Bárány contracted tuberculosis of the bones, which led him to have difficulty moving a knee. He did not let this physical disability prevent him from enjoying an active and healthy lifestyle: two of his favorite activities were playing tennis and hiking in the Alps.

It may be that Bárány’s early illness inspired him to find cures for diseases, but, regardless, he finished his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1900. He then studied at the psychiatric-neurological clinic of Professor Kracpelin in Germany. It was there that his attention was first drawn to neurological problems. Over the years he worked with various doctors and, following different theories, was finally able to clarify the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus. It was for this important investigation that he was awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The news surprised Bárány, who was in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp at the time. He had been captured while serving in the Austrian army as a civilian surgeon treating wounded soldiers. While a prisoner of war, he was deprived of any type of literature, laboratory facilities or other scientific assistance.

Through the intervention of Prince Carl of Sweden and in the name of the Red Cross he was liberated in 1916. That same year he went to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize. After this, Bárány returned to Vienna but was disappointed with the attitude of his Austrian colleagues, who accused him of giving incomplete references to other scientists’ discoveries that had aided in his own. This tension in the scientific community finally led Bárány to accept an invitation to give lessons at the Otological Institute in Uppsala, where he remained until the end of his life.

Bárány married Ida Felicitas Berger in 1909, and the couple had two sons and a daughter. The eldest son became a professor of pharmacology at Uppsala University, the other an assistant professor of medicine at the Caroline Institute in Stockholm, while the daughter married a physician. In the last years of his life Bárány studied the causes of rheumatism and continued to work on a book about the subject even after he had suffered a stroke that left him nearly paralyzed. He died in 1936.