Prof. Dr. med.
Richard Bauer
1879 - 1959

Richard Bauer was born into the Jewish family of the lawyer Jakob Bauer and his wife Friedricke, née Eisenmann, in Vienna in 1879.

Bauer took up medical studies at the University of Vienna in 1897 and was awarded his doctorate in 1903. He initially worked as an assistant physician until 1908, then as an assistant physician at the II Medical University Clinic in Vienna with Edmund von Neusser and with his successor Norbert Ortner. Bauer travelled to Berlin in 1908 for further training at the Robert Koch Institute with August von Wassermann. He worked with Elie Metschnikoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1909. He worked on the metabolism of galactose from an early stage in cooperation with the Medical-Chemical Institute of the University of Vienna. Bauer developed a method for detecting galactose in urine and a galactose load test for testing liver function. Bauer habilitated in internal medicine at the Vienna Medical Faculty in 1912 and was appointed university lecturer. He was the primary physician and medical director of the II Medical Department of the large Wieden Hospital in Vienna’s IV district from 1917. Bauer received an extraordinary professorship (“Professor Extraordinarius”) for internal medicine at the University of Vienna in 1926.

His scientific work focused on questions from the field of serology, the properties of complement, the Wassermann reaction in urine as well as liver and bile duct diseases. Similar to Hermann Strauss, Bauer dealt with the possibilities of examining liver and kidney function. Bauer published on liver diagnostics, in particular on “icterus catarrhalis”, which he attributed to “hepatitis”, the cause of which had not been established at the time. In addition, he dealt with tumour diseases and questions on the development of carcinoma.

After 1933

Richard Bauer travelled to the USA to give lectures in the fall of 1937. He visited the USA again in December 1937 and arrived in New York via St. Albans in the Vermont District on 7 December 1937. He then returned to Vienna. Richard Bauer was able to flee Europe via Cherbourg on the Queen Mary and reach New York on 16 March 1938, shortly after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich. Richard Bauer applied for naturalisation in the USA on 1 January 1938. He found employment at what was then the Manhattan General Hospital, New York. The hospital had a research department at the time, which enabled Bauer to continue his scientific work and to publish in specialist journals. Following the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in Vienna, the Nazi authorities withdrew his authorisation to teach at the Vienna Medical Faculty in April 1938.

Bauer repeatedly visited his home town Vienna after 1945 and finally returned to Austria in 1955. He had been a member of the Society of Physicians in Vienna since 1908 and was appointed honorary member in 1947. He delivered the lecture “Über ein neues Leiden, die Galaktose-Krankheit (Galactosämie)” there on 14 November 1958.

Richard Bauer died at the age of 80 in a sanatorium in Vienna at the beginning of September 1959.