One hundred years ago: the history of cryptococcosis in Greifswald. Medical mycology in the nineteenth century.

Abstract

Medico-mycological investigations began at Greifswald in Germany as early as 1842 when Wilhelm Baum (1799-1883) was appointed to the chair of surgery of the university. This is shown by some theses of the time, as well as by the discovery of the contagious nature of pityriasis versicolor by Carl Ferdinand Eichstedt (1816-92), who identified a fungus as the cause (1846), later named Microsporon furfur (C. Robin 1853). In 1868 the physician Karl Friedrich Mosler (1831-1911) published clinical-mycological studies and investigations about animal feeding with yeasts. Some time later (1870) Friedrich Grohé (1830-86) and his assistants, Alwin R.A. Block (1843-?) and M.R. Roth of the Pathological Institute, described the results of transmission studies with 'Aspergillus glaucus, Penicillium glaucum and yeast'. His successor in the chair, Paul Grawitz (1850-1932), also published the results of his own mycological investigations. Finally, on 7 July 1894, at an evening lecture of the Greifswald Medical Society, Abraham Buschke (1868-1943) from the Hospital of Surgery gave a talk 'on a peculiar disease caused by coccidia', which was followed by a talk by the pathologist Otto Busse (1867-1922) on a 'demonstration of a pathogenic coccidia species'. Busse's subsequent publications are the first proper descriptions of cryptococcosis (1894 ff.). However, Cryptococcus neoformans was named after F. Sanfelice, whose results were published later (1895).