Rubner, Max

RUBNER, Max (1854–1932), one of the greatest physiologists and hygienists of the 19th and 20th centuries. He graduated from the University of Leipzig. A student of C. Ludwig and Voit; from 1885 to 1891, he was a professor of hygiene in Marburg, and from 1891, for several decades, a professor at the University of Berlin and director of the university's Institute of Hygiene. Rubner entered the history of science as a major worker in both the fields of hygiene and physiology. Rubner's works in the field of the physiology of metabolism of living organisms represent the completion of the historical works of Lavoisier and Laplace on the chemical interpretation of animal respiration processes and the nature of animal heat, and the works of R. Mayer and Helmholtz on the law of conservation of energy, insofar as Rubner's works provided, through precise experiments, a numerical expression of the processes of metabolism and energy in living organisms. While being exceptionally important in the development of scientific physiology, these works nevertheless bear the stamp of one-sidedness in the sense that an attempt is made at a purely mechanical interpretation of the processes of energy and substance exchange in living organisms. The law of isodynamics formulated by Rubner erases the qualitative significance of individual nutrients, proceeding only from their energy evaluation; the law of surfaces, which points to the dependence of the intensity of metabolism on the size of the animal's surface, takes phenomena in an abstract geometric form, without taking into account the biological characteristics of animals that have a bearing on the intensity of metabolism (cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals; biological significance of the integumentary formations of animals). Thus, in recent times, more and more material has been accumulating that reveals the limited significance of the law of surfaces precisely when biological characteristics are taken into account. Rubner holds a historical role in the materialist development of questions of heat production and heat dissipation in the bodies of animals and humans. At the same time, these works formed the basis for mechanistically one-sided approaches to understanding work in the bodies of animals and humans. Already at the beginning of the emerging works in this direction regarding the experiments of Fick and Wislicenus, Engels gave a vivid picture of this crudely mechanistic understanding of work processes in the organism, laying the foundation for a truly scientific development of these questions ("Labor" in "Dialectics of Nature," 5th ed., p. 46, Moscow-Leningrad, 1931). Rubner produced a whole series of beautifully written popular essays on questions of nutrition and metabolism. In addition to a huge number of works published in the periodical press and devoted mainly to the physiology of metabolism, Rubner is the author of the repeatedly republished "Lehrbuch der Hygiene" (Berlin, 1895; Russian edition, St. Petersburg, 1897). Under the editorship of Rubner (together with M. Gruber and M. Fick) and with his participation as an author, the monumental "Handbuch der Hygiene" was published (Vols. I-V, Leipzig, 1912–1928). The first German hygiene journals ("Archiv für Hygiene," Munich, since 1883, and "Hygienische Rundschau," Berlin, 1891–1921) were published for many years under the editorship of Rubner.