Completing Medical Studies in Frankfurt

The major motivation for Gerhard to move to Frankfurt was the possibility of having some time, even while engaged in his clinical medicine studies, to work in Gustav Embden's lab. For this to happen he did need Embden's approval even though no formal application was required for changing from Tubingen to Frankfurt for medical studies. If Embden had not written that he would accept him, Gerhard would not have made the move. Embden later told Gerhard that, in fact, he had accepted him with some reluctance, perhaps based on what he learned when he wrote to faculty members who served as references relating to Gerhard's years in Tubingen. There, for example, Gerhard had volunteered for some spare-time work in the lab of the physiologist Professor Wilhelm Trendelenburg, who gave him a problem of determining alveolar carbon dioxide in frog lungs. For this "I had to puncture the pleura with a mercury-sealed gas-tight pipette and then very slowly draw a sample of air and then inject this air into a micro metabolic gas analysis apparatus (micro-Haldane) and determine the carbon dioxide. Of course, I spilled some mercury; as you can imagine, it was my second or third semester and I had no idea of instrumentation yet." So when Embden wrote to Trendelenburg to inquire about Gerhard, he may have been told that Gerhard was given a simple experiment and "as a consequence the laboratory was flooded with mercury!" Still, Embden accepted Gerhard's proposal and "he was incredibly nice to me."Frankfurt was attractive from another point of view as well. The university was founded in 1914 by wealthy Frankfurt citizens, including Jewish businessmen and industrialists, and received significant support from the City of Frankfurt, whereas other universities were institutions of the German states. The University of Frankfurt seemed to be more liberal, a more favorable environment for a Jewish student. Embden's department was part of the Theodor Stem Haus, which included physiology and pharmacology departments of the university, as well as a research institute for colloid chemistry and another for x-ray science. The money for this large medical research institution was given by the widow of an industrialist for whom it was named (as is the long riverside road, Theodor-Stern-Kai, on which the university's medical faculty is still located).1Gerhard pursued the clinical portion of his medical studies between 1922 and 1924. During this time he did not have a lot of time in the lab; and, because of his schedule of clinics and lectures, he was not able to audit Embden's lectures. An assistant was assigned to supervise him during the one afternoon of the week available to him in the lab. There he met with one great disappointment. Based on the excitement he felt in reading the book by Ernst Schmitz, one of the methods he was most interested in learning was liver perfusion, through which Emden had contributed so much to knowledge of intermediary metabolism. On asking one of the assistants, Gerhard learned that they hadn't done any liver perfusion in the Embden lab in recent years. Embden's current interest in 1922 was in measurements of inorganic phosphate formation in muscle. "All they did in Embden's lab was snip muscles, snip frog muscles" and measure phosphate.The cost of living had increased since the end of the war, but was affordable in mid-1922, when Gerhard came to Frankfurt. Soon, however, the great inflation arrived. Living costs increased more and more steeply. "It became so expensive that the amount which I could get from home wasn't enough anymore, so Embden arranged for me that I could stay at the country house of his brother-in-law, a high official in a big chemical company in Frankfurt, the Gold and Silver Company. I had to do a little housework, chop wood, feed the dogs, and take care of the dogs, and shine the shoes of the family, and things like that, and for that the landlord paid for the railway. I had to take a commuter train to Frankfurt every morning. …