Authentication

User ID:

Password:

Iniciar sessão

U.Porto Memory

Doctors Honoris Causa by the University of Porto

Ulrich Georg Trendelenburg

	Proposal: Faculty of Medicine Date: October 21, 1982

Ulrich Georg Trendelenburg was born in Gehlsdorf, in the north of Germany, on 31 December 1922. He was the youngest of the four children of Paul Trendelenburg (1884-1931), a specialist in Pharmacology, and Veronika Wilcken (1892-1973). One of his grandfathers was the professor of Surgery who created the appendectomy technique and who became known for the Trendelenburg position (described to facilitate the exam of the narrow pelvis). The philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was his great-grandfather.

In 1941, as he was getting ready to attend Medicine, Ulrich was incorporated in the Luftwaffe in the middle of the Second World War. He began serving as a pilot in March 1945 and was captured on 19 April.

After 19 months spent in a concentration camp, he returned to Germany. Ulrich graduated in Medicine, at the University of Göttingen (1952) and, afterwards, he was invited to teach for 6 months at the Uppsala University, in Sweden. During this period, he came in close contact with the area of Pharmacology through E. Barany and meet J. H. Burn.

Between 1952 and 1954 he was a scholarship holder for the British Council, in Oxford, and in 1956 he obtained his PhD in Pharmacology at Oxford University.

In the same year, Ulrich returned to Germany and, after a year working in Mainz with G. Kuschinski, he transferred to Harvard University, in the U.S.A., by invitation of Otto Krayer. Between 1957 and 1968 he was a professor and a researcher in that University – he was appointed associate professor of Pharmacology in 1963 and director of the department in 1966. In 1963 he was visiting professor at Hamburg University.

In 1968 Ulrich was a full professor at Wurzburg, in the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the field of Experimental Pharmacology of the autonomous nervous system, Ulrich Georg Trendelenburg developed numerous researches, among which are those referring to lymph node transmission, over- and under-sensitisation of effector organs with adrenergic innervation, metabolising catecholamines and the physiological and pharmacological role of the neuronal and extra-neuronal systems in the processes of adrenergic mediation. He was the author of book chapters deemed essential for current Pharmacology and took on editorial responsibilities in scientific magazines both American and European.

Ulrich Georg Trendelenburg was president of the German Society of Pharmacology and a consultant for the Executive Committee of the International Union of Pharmacology, a member of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the British Physiological Society, the British Pharmacology Society and of the Deutsche Pharmakologische Gesellschaft.

Ulrich was an honorary member of the pharmacology societies of Poland, India, Czech Republic, Germany and Venezuela. He was granted the title of honorary doctor by the universities of Tampere (Finland), Porto, Ohio (U.S.A.), Lublin (Poland) and Prague (Czech Republic). He also received the “Oswald Schmiedeberg” award of the German Society of Pharmacology.

He died on 21 November 2006.
(Universidade Digital / Gestão de Informação, 2013)