Teleky

Teleky Ludwig (Ludwig Teleky) (born 1872), one of the greatest contemporary hygienists and pathologists. He began his activity as a privat-docent and organizer of a seminar on Social Hygiene at the medical faculty of the University of Vienna, where he worked until 1918, when he moved to Germany. He was one of the first organizers of sanitary labor inspection in Prussia. From 1919 to 1933, he was senior sanitary inspector in the Rhineland and was dismissed from this position for "inappropriate thinking" by the fascist government immediately after Hitler came to power. He organized the Social Hygiene Academy in Düsseldorf; he is its director. Among bourgeois theorists and practitioners of occupational hygiene, he stood on the extreme left wing, fighting not only with entrepreneurs and their influence on factory and insurance legislation, but also with those factory doctors and scientists (e.g., Professor K. W. Lehmann) who openly or covertly served the interests of capital with their professional-hygienic and professional-pathological works. In connection with this, T. was subjected to special forms of masked boycott-he was not elected to the governing bodies of scientific societies and to the editorial boards of journals on occupational hygiene, which in Germany were under the direct influence of heavy industry entrepreneurs. T. is the author of more than two hundred journal articles and the author of a number of solid monographs (on mercury poisoning, on pneumoconioses, on sanitary labor statistics, on statistics of sick funds, etc.). He proposed as one of the cardinal signs of early lead poisoning the symptom of weakness of finger extensors, which became established under the name of "Teleky's symptom," but did not find general recognition. Under the editorship of Teleky (together with Schlossmann and Gotstein) the six-volume "Handbuch der sozialen Hygiene und Gesundheitsfürsorge" (Berlin, 1925-1927) was published, the second volume of which is the only contemporary foreign manual on occupational hygiene and occupational pathology. Since 1930, T. will publish together with Zanger the internationally important journal "Archiv für Gewerbepathologie und Gewerbehygiene" (Berlin).