Otto Kahler and his family: II. Ripening years in Prague

Summary

Otto Kahler (1849–1893), a son of a wound physician at the Provincial Prison, spent his childhood and youth in his native Prague. After graduated from Charles-Ferdinand University (1871, 1872) he became a second-generation physician in an old German-Czech peasant family. He thereafter worked as an intern (from 1873) and assistant (from 1875) with Prof. Joseph Halla at the IInd Medical Clinic of the General Hospital. Shortly before habilitation (1878), in collaboration with Arnold Pick from the Insane Asylum, he began an intense research on pathology and pathological anatomy of the central nervous system (1878–1880) which resulted in discovery of the rule for arrangement of fibres in the posterior funiculi of the spinal cord – the Kahler-Pick law (1880). Then he coedited the weekly Prager medicinische Wochenschrift (1880–1889). After the division of the University according to teaching language the recently appointed extraordinary professor (1882) as well as the whole IInd Medical Clinic belonged to the German Charles-Ferdinand University. His encounter of a case of multiple myeloma in the Prague Merchants´ Hospital in December 1885 attracted his attention to symptomatology of this disease.

Keywords:

genealogy – Charles-Ferdinand University – Kahler-Pick law – Multiple myeloma – Otto Kahler – Prague