Erich Hoffmann

Erich Hoffmann (April 25, 1868 - May 8 1959) was a German dermatologist who was a native of Witzmitz, Pomerania. He studied medicine at the Berlin Military Academy, and was later a professor at the Universities of Halle and Bonn.

Hoffmann is remembered through his work done as an assistant to zoologist Fritz Schaudinn (1871-1906) at the Charité Clinic in Berlin. In 1905 Schaudinn and Hoffmann discovered the bacterium that was responsible for syphilis. It was a spiral-shaped spirochete called Treponema pallidum which was taken from a papula in the vulva of a patient with secondary syphilis. The two doctors documented their findings in a treatise called Vorläufiger Bericht über das Vorkommen von Spirochaeten in syphilitischen Krankheitsprodukten und bei Papillome.

Hoffmann left Germany during the era of National Socialism, but returned to Bonn after the war, and established a laboratory. In the late 1940s he published two books regarding his life in medicine, titled Wollen und Schaffen and Ringen um Vollendung.

References

• Anais Brasileiros de Dermatologia, "The Discovery of Treponema pallidum"