The Wesselhoefts: A medical dynasty from the age of Goethe to the era of nuclear medicine

Abstract

For six generations, members of the Wesselhoeft family have practiced medicine in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Canada and/or the USA. In the early decades of the 19th century, two Wesselhoeft brothers left Europe to eventually settle in New England, where they and their progeny gave rise to a regional medical dynasty. The Wesselhoeft doctors became well-known practitioners of homeopathy, hydropathy, conventional medicine and surgery, in academic and general clinical settings. An additional connection was established to the literary worlds of Germany and the USA, either through friendships or as personal physicians.

Keywords

Wesselhoeft physicians dynasty homeopathy hydropathy pediatrics cardiology family medicine communicable disease psychiatry Boston Germany

Introduction

Descriptions exist of families whose members practiced medicine for many generations, such as the Munros in Scotland,¹ the Chamberlens in England,² the Shattuck family in Boston,³ and the Vergo family in Adelaide, Australia.⁴ Any account of medical dynasties would be incomplete if it omitted the Wesselhoefts, whose members have practiced medicine or surgery in five different countries between the 1600s and present times, with an unbroken chain in every generation from the 1820s. Wesselhoeft physicians have typically lived life to the full, and their history is of interest for the following reasons: (1) a multi-generation record of deep engagement in, and contributions to, the variety of systems that have characterized medicine over the last 200 years, such as homeopathy, hydropathy, modern medicine and surgery in adults and children; (2) a series of strong professional or personal associations (both positive and negative) with eminent literary figures and philosophers, including Johann Wolfgang Goethe, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and others; (3) their scientific and clinical contributions to medicine, and (4) preservation of links between the German and American branches of the family throughout this period.

Physicians in the Wesselhoeft Family

The Wesselhoeft family can be traced back to Buxtehude, Germany, as early as 1327. The family coat of arms contains one red and two golden roses with symbols meaning “Work your way upwards, it brings profit, wealth and property.” Hans Wesselhoeft (dates unknown) is considered the ancestor of a branch of the family that now has spread throughout many parts of Germany, as well as England and the USA, and which has given rise to many physicians. In 1600 Hans Wesselhoeft was noted to be a “free citizen, official surgeon and barber,” likely the first of his trade in the family. In the 18th century, two brothers became ancestors of lines that included the 12 physicians who are the subjects of this article. These brothers were named Johann Georg (1723–1798) and Johann Friedrich (1736–1790) Wesselhoeft. All of the physicians derive from the older brother, Johann Georg, with the exception of Hadwig and Rikke Wesselhoeft, descendants of Johann Friedrich. A family tree of these individuals is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Family tree of Wesselhoeft physicians.

Johann Georg Wesselhoeft’s son Carl (1767–1847) was a successful printer and publisher in Jena, and was on friendly terms with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, one of Europe’s most eminent figures. Two of Carl’s sons became physicians – William (or Wilhelm) and Robert Ferdinand. On his visits to the Wesselhoeft home, Goethe took kindly towards the young boys, especially William, encouraging him to develop artistically and to observe weather patterns from the Jena observatory, and he gave both boys the opportunity to work as field hands on his farm.⁵ Goethe’s influence and proclivities towards homeopathy were to shape William’s career choice.

The individual Wesselhoeft physicians will be described, beginning with William (1794–1858) and his direct descendants, then Robert Ferdinand (1796–1852) (Figure 2) and his descendants, then finally the descendants of Johann Friedrich, namely Hadwig and Rikke Wesselhoeft.

Figure 2.

Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft and family, 1843. With permission, Special Collections of the Brooks Memorial Library, Brattleboro, VT.

William Wesselhoeft

As a young man, William Wesselhoeft joined the German student protest movement, known as Burschenschaften, an activity that landed him in prison, from which he escaped after four months. He later moved to Switzerland, studied medicine at the University of Basel and was appointed to the faculty as an anatomy demonstrator. When German authorities ordered the extradition of political refugees from Switzerland, he left Europe for the USA where, in 1824, he initially settled in a German-speaking Pennsylvania community. Influenced by Goethe’s attitude towards homeopathy, William Wesselhoeft decided to take up this newly introduced form of practice, and subsequently co-founded the first American homeopathic medical academy in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a short-lived venture that encountered financial problems. In 1842 he moved to Boston, and then to Brattleboro, Vermont, with his brother. As a devotee of homeopathy and Swedenborgian teachings, William appealed to the Boston transcendentalists. Elizabeth Peabody wrote of his “tender sensibility and disposition, love of nature.”⁶ William Wesselhoeft’s success in treating scarlet fever endeared him to many parents in the Boston community and helped build up a lucrative practice. His patients included Emily Dickinson (who is believed by some to have suffered from anorexia nervosa),⁷ the abolitionist Reverend Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott), and Sophie Peabody Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne (see below).⁸

William Palmer Wesselhoeft (1835–1909) and George Palmer Wesselhoeft (1837–1890)

Two of William’s sons became physicians, William Palmer and George Palmer. Little is known about the life and career of the latter, a graduate of Harvard in 1859. In the first years after his medical qualification, George Palmer worked at the Wesselhoeft Water Cure, moved his practice to Brookline, Massachusetts, and later to Maine. He died of pneumonia in Brookline at the age of 53. It is from George Palmer Wesselhoeft that the pediatric surgeon, Conrad Wesselhoeft Jr. is descended (see below).

As to William Palmer, he graduated from Harvard in 1857 and became Professor of Chronic Diseases at Boston University School of Medicine. William Palmer Wesselhoeft was a leader in the homeopathic community until his retirement in 1904, and earned national fame as a clinician, being consulted by patients throughout the country. William Palmer was described as a strong personality, optimistic and self-assured in his beliefs. His obituary referred to his “gifts of the true clinician … rare powers of observation … almost intuitive insight, strong common sense … [and] ready wit.”⁹

William Fessenden Wesselhoeft (1862–1943)

William Palmer Wesselhoeft’s son, William Fessenden Wesselhoeft, graduated from Harvard in 1887 and joined the faculty at Boston University School of Medicine, where he served as Professor of Surgery. He also held an appointment as Chief Surgeon at the Massachusetts Homeopathic (later Memorial) Hospital. Wesselhoeft was well connected in Boston society and his daughter, Alice, married Leverett Saltonstall, who later became governor of the state and a US senator, and was a patient of Conrad Wesselhoeft II, the Saltonstall family physician. None of W. F. Wesselhoeft’s children kept up the family tradition of medical practice.

Conrad Wesselhoeft Jr. (born 1933)

George Palmer Wesselhoeft’s great-grandson, Conrad Wesselhoeft Jr, lives in retirement at the writing of this paper. He received his medical training at Tufts University in 1959, completed a surgical residency at New England Medical Center and a pediatric surgery fellowship in Washington, DC before joining the faculty of Brown University, where he worked in the division of pediatric surgery, specializing in thoracic surgery and pectus excavatum.¹⁰ Conrad Wesselhoeft, Jr. published over 40 papers in the peer reviewed literature, the most recent being in 2005.

Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft (1796–1852)

Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft obtained a doctorate of law from the University of Jena in 1821, and was then appointed to the court in Saxe-Weimar in January 1822. As a free-thinking liberal who identified with the German revolutionary movement, he joined the Burschenschaften and, with his brother, was wrongly implicated in a murder of an establishment activist. This was a case of guilt-by-association on the part of the authorities, who assumed that because the Wesselhoeft brothers belonged to the same organization as the real culprit, then they must have been party to the crime. Based on this assumption, he was fired from his job and tried to make a career by investing in an oil mill and fishery at Erfurt. In 1824, he was arrested again for continued revolutionary activities and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Since he was being tried for an offense that could have been treasonable, he was fortunate to escape the death penalty. The King of Prussia reduced R.F. Wesselhoeft’s sentence to seven years; the more liberal Grand Duke Karl Friedrich then ordered his release in 1831. However, there were some in government who still wished to take punitive action and, although Robert Ferdinand was acquitted of forgery charges in 1839, he was later dismissed from his job in Weimar on disciplinary grounds. While in prison, he struck up a friendship with the prison doctor, who invited Robert Ferdinand to observe medical rounds and was impressed at the young man’s diagnostic skills. As was the case with his older brother William, Robert Ferdinand was driven away from Europe by unfavorable political conditions, and left with his wife and family for the USA in 1840.

Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft first lived in Pennsylvania, where he learnt homeopathy from his brother. Building on his medical reading and experience at Magdeburg, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania from which he received a Doctorate of Medicine in 1841. He received a second medical degree from the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1843 for a thesis on scarlet fever. After completing his studies, he joined William’s practice in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. Before coming to America, Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft had been impressed by the success of hydropathic medicine, a treatment approach popularized in Europe by Priessnitz, who had personally treated Wesselhoeft for “bilious and rheumatic fevers.”¹¹ Upon the encouragement of Mrs Lovell Farr, a patient he had successfully treated in Boston, R.F. Wesselhoeft located to Brattleboro, Vermont, where the abundant natural springs suggested that a hydropathic practice might flourish. It is also widely believed that Wesselhoeft’s departure from the Boston area followed his denouncement as a quack by the prominent physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, in medical society lectures given by Holmes on homeopathy and kindred delusions.¹² Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft was lampooned in two of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels, “The Blithedale Romance” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” where Hawthorne portrayed Wesselhoeft as Professor Westervelt and Doctor Rappaccini respectively. Westervelt was characterized as a satanic figure, with “artifice in his eyes … a metallic laugh … and cat-like circumspection,” and Rappaccini was cast in an equally unfavorable light as a bogus professor in dispute with Dr Padua, who represented Wendell Holmes. To understand why Hawthorne, who was a neighbor of the Wesselhoefts, should write about Robert Ferdinand Wesselhoeft in this manner, it is relevant to know that Robert’s brother, William, was physician to Hawthorne’s wife Sophie and had used hypnosis on her without permission, which Hawthorne regarded as a serious ethical violation. Perhaps he obtained some measure of revenge in these two novels and it is interesting to note that Robert Ferdinand never responded publicly to the charges made by Holmes, but in private correspondence he expressed bitterness.

Regardless of the real reasons behind the move to the remote community of Brattleboro, Wesselhoeft’s Water Cure Establishment, which was the third of its kind in the US, became an instant success, drawing the rich and famous from far and wide, including former president Martin van Buren, two sons of former Vice-President John C. Calhoun, and Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist and author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” whose husband described the clinic as “finer than any German Spa.”¹³

A typical treatment regime comprised early waking at 4 am for patients then to be wrapped in wool blankets leaving only the face or head uncovered, while they were immersed in water, steam or given Sitz baths or cold dunks, and with access to unlimited amounts of drinking water. When a staff member decided that the amount of sweating had been sufficient, the patient was then released to go about their daily affairs. In addition, homeopathic medicines were prescribed, and a varied menu of occupational activities was provided, including music. Among his staff was the talented musician, Christian Schuster who, like Wesselhoeft, was a refugee from Germany. Schuster lead the twice weekly singing and dancing activity and wrote the Water-Cure Polka, which he dedicated to Drs. Wesselhoeft and Felerer (Figure 3). At its peak, the establishment held around 400 patients, and Dr Wesselhoeft took on an associate in 1848. Two years later, Robert Ferdinand became ill with “apoplexy,” a term used to describe stroke or cerebral hemorrhage, and returned to Germany, where he died. The center declined after his death and Mrs Wesselhoeft and her children moved back to Boston, where two sons, Conrad I and Walter, became doctors and practiced with distinction in the Boston area.

Figure 3.

Water-Cure Polka Facesheet. With permission of Special Collections of the Brooks Memorial Library, Brattleboro, Vermont.

Conrad Wesselhoeft I (1834–1904)

Conrad Wesselhoeft I graduated from Harvard in 1856 and was a co-founder of the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), which had been created by a group of Boston homeopaths who convinced the university to buy out a struggling female medical college in the city and introduce a fully homeopathic curriculum in the new school. Conrad Wesselhoeft was one of three Wesselhoefts out of 14 BUSM faculty members, serving as Professor of Materia Medica. BUSM was unusual in its acceptance of women at a time when nearly all medical schools apart from a small number of strictly female colleges prohibited their admission. This decision to admit women had been urged by leading advocates in the community such as Louisa May Alcott and Julia Ward Howe, who argued that such a move would increase the educational impact and “pecuniary forces” of the college. Conrad was in full support of this progressive decision. Evidence of his forward-looking stance in other ways included being among the first to use placebos in drug trials. He was active in teaching and research on the BUSM faculty, served as president of the American Institute of Homeopathy, and conducted a private practice to famous literati, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Lloyd Garrison, social reformer and editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Alcott thought so highly of her doctor that she dedicated her novel “Jo’s Boys and how they turned out (1886)” to Conrad Wesselhoeft, and portrayed the lead character, Nan, as a female homeopathic doctor.

Walter Wesselhoeft (1839–1920)

Walter Wesselhoeft was born in Weimar in 1839, the younger brother to Conrad I. He came with his family to the USA as an infant. In his teens, he returned to Germany for study and as a university student fought four duels, which might suggest the presence of somewhat volatile or pugnacious traits. His family felt it best for him to return to Boston, where he could be monitored more closely, and he enrolled at Harvard, graduating with a medical degree in 1859.¹⁴ He joined his brother’s practice briefly and then moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Although Walter was accepted into the Halifax social circle and practice blossomed, his medical peers never fully accepted him, perhaps because he was American, a supporter of the northern states in the looming Civil War, and most of all, because he was a homeopath. Walter and his wife left Canada for Germany, where he hoped to contribute his part as a surgeon for the Prussian army in the war against France. Things did not go according to plan and, after a period of study in Germany, Walter and his wife returned to America, joining his brother’s practice in Boston and later establishing his own practice in nearby Cambridge. He was also offered a faculty position as Professor of Anatomy at BUSM, an institution he served for the next 35 years.

Walter entered medicine with some reluctance, writing “My own choice this was not, but somehow I was destined for the profession, taking it for granted.” He seems never to have resolved certain ambivalences about his career and the comparative merits of two systems of medicine, even though he became very well regarded, attracted some prominent patients and had every reason to be proud of his son Conrad II’s achievements in medicine. As to whether or not homeopathy was a superior system to conventional medicine, Walter Wesselhoeft declared himself to be a “mugwump” on the matter, i.e. a fence-sitter. Among Walter’s friends and neighbors were William James, the Harvard psychologist, physician and philosopher, and William Dean Howells.¹⁵ Howells was a prominent literary figure, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, author of the Rise of Silas Lapham, and a patient of Walter’s for many years. An account by Arms described the friendship between the two men and included some light-hearted poetry Walter Wesselhoeft had written, including one poem alluding to Howells’ illness, parodying the styles of Wordsworth and Tennyson and perhaps reflecting a latent poetic talent.¹⁶ Other patients included the sculptor F. Edwin Elwell. Walter Wesselhoeft’s daughter Amy wrote down some childhood memories of her father’s encounters with friends and patients. She recalled that “Mr. Howells was the only one I liked. He was no older than father and they always had good jokes together … Mr. James [William] was all right too. He talked and laughed with Father and never bothered about us at all … Others leaned towards [Father] as they spoke as if they wanted to warm their old selves at anything so beautiful and sunshining as Father was.”¹⁷

Conrad Wesselhoeft II (1884–1962)

The life and career of Conrad Wesselhoeft II has been described in detail elsewhere,¹⁸ and this information will not be repeated at length here. Suffice it to say that the major themes in his professional life were: (i) an initial commitment to homeopathic medicine as a faculty member at Boston University and performance of large controlled trials of homeopathy far ahead of his time; (ii) a shift of primary allegiance to allopathic medicine in the 1920s; (iii) the excellence of his work at Harvard, particularly in infectious disease; and (iv) the perpetuation of his name in the form of an endowed chair, the Conrad Wesselhoeft Professorship of Medicine at Boston City Hospital and BUSM. Holders of this chair have included some exceptionally distinguished physicians, including two editors of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Conrad Wesselhoeft was decorated for valor in World War I, receiving two Distinguished Service Crosses, the Purple Heart and the Croix de Guerre, for his actions during the Aisne-Marne and Verdun offensives; his grandson, Conrad Wesselhoeft IV, has described his grandfather to this author as epitomizing “courage, both physical and intellectual.”¹⁹ Conrad was fully conscious of his father Walter’s inner conflicts about homeopathy, and upon his appointment as Professor of Communicable Diseases at Harvard – the first in his family to attain such a prestigious position – he visited his parents’ graves, and in a letter to his sister, Gertrude, expressed a debt of gratitude to his parents, knowing what his appointment would have meant to them. He wrote that it represented a sort of redemption for his parents, who gave him “an inheritance that has enabled me to get up to this position – and I never aspired to it.”²⁰

Robert Wesselhoeft III (1944–2007)

Robert (“Toby”) Wesselhoeft III was a great-grandson of the above Walter Wesselhoeft, and great-nephew of Conrad Wesselhoeft II, some of whose patients he inherited. He trained at BUSM, graduating MD in 1977, as well as receiving a Masters in Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University. His decision to enter medicine was somewhat belated, being spurred by his mother’s death from cancer in 1967. Toby saw medical practice as a way to help others and carry on his mother’s legacy of community service, saying “After trying my hand at various occupations, it became clear to me that I wanted to be more intimately involved in direct service to people. I had been delving into the family history, and I keyed into our legacy in family medicine as service of the highest degree”²¹ (Figure 4). Toby Wesselhoeft accepted a faculty position at Tufts University School of Medicine, where he became the first Chief of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. He did much to promote family medicine as an academic discipline and inspired many students to choose this career specialty. He is remembered at Tufts through the Dr Robert “Toby” Wesselhoeft III Teaching Award, which is given annually to a family practitioner who exemplifies the tradition of physician-as-teacher, inspires by example, shows kindness, generosity of spirit, and an uncompromising commitment to his or her patients and students. Dr Wesselhoeft established a network of international contacts, which lead to family medicine clerkships in Scotland, New Zealand, South Africa and the territory formerly called Zululand. In addition to his busy professional schedule, Toby Wesselhoeft was an active volunteer in community and church activities.

Figure 4.

Robert “Toby” Wesselhoeft III with three photographs of Robert Ferdinand, Conrad I and Conrad II Wesselhoeft, 1998. Image reproduced with permission of Maria Ober, Office of Communications, Boston University School of Medicine.

Hadwig Wesselhoeft (1926–2015)

Hadwig Wesselhoeft can be considered a fourth-generation Wesselhoeft physician, being born 42 years after the last third-generation Wesselhoeft (Conrad II) and 18 years before Toby Wesselhoeft. Hadwig was born and raised in Germany and decided to become a pediatrician at the age of 10. When she completed high school in 1944, places in medical school were scarce, with priority given to returning war veterans; so she trained as a nurse, and was subsequently accepted into medical school in Hamburg. In 1956, she commenced a pediatric fellowship at Harvard, an opportunity facilitated by her cousin, Conrad Wesselhoeft II, who with his wife offered hospitality during her time in Boston. Further training took place at the Montreal Children’s Hospital during 1957–1958 and 1963–1967, then at Johns Hopkins in 1970, where she studied nuclear medicine. Hadwig Wesselhoeft returned to Germany, accepting a faculty position at the University of Göttingen, where she became an authority on diagnostic nuclear medicine in pediatric cardiology. She published continuously over a 20-year time period in leading journals related to her specialty. Among her papers were studies on the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias in neonates,²² and one of the earliest papers to show the safe application of nuclear angiography as a diagnostic technique in infants.²³ In 1984, Hadwig Wesselhoeft retired from medical practice on health grounds.²⁴ She valued her family traditions, and in 1996 hosted one of the periodic family reunions of the German and American Wesselhoefts that still take place.

Rikke Wesselhoeft (born 1972)

Rikke Wesselhoeft’s great-great-grandmother, Alwine Wesselhoeft (1878-??) is believed to be descended from Johann Friedrich. Alwine left Hamburg in 1901 for Denmark, with her three-year old son, Alwin Gustav Wesselhoeft (1898–1983), where that branch of the family still lives, and is the only family with that name in Denmark. Rikke Wesselhoeft trained at the Universities of Aarhus and South Denmark, where she received her MD and PhD degrees, respectively; she subsequently completed a fellowship in epidemiology at Columbia University and now practices as a child psychiatrist at the University of Southern Denmark. Her publications concern the topic of childhood depression and other emotional disorders.

Conclusions

This account has described six generations of Wesselhoeft physicians and the mark they left on medicine regionally and internationally. Adverse political conditions in Europe during the 1820s and 1830s drove two Wesselhoeft brothers to the US – Pennsylvania then New England – where they spread their medical gospel and produced a medical dynasty, making Wesselhoeft a name of importance in Boston social and medical circles for over 150 years. These two brothers became leaders of homeopathy and are still venerated by that community, as are their sons who were either co-founders of, or actively involved with, one of the nation’s most progressive medical schools at the time. With the decline of homeopathy and hydropathy in US medicine, later generations of the family established their reputations in other ways, notably in the treatment of infectious disease, pediatric thoracic surgery, pediatric cardiology, child psychiatry and in the development of primary care as an academic discipline. Some of the personalities described here engaged in political activism, social reform, community or church work, and some maintained close ties with leaders of 19th century American literature and philosophy. At the present time, as noted, one Wesselhoeft physician practices in Europe, but none in the USA, although Robert Alexander Wesselhoeft IV, son of Toby and Dianne Wesselhoeft, is pursuing a PhD in biology and health sciences. The story given here reflects an impressive 200-year record of achievement in the history of medicine – a record which has been aptly summed up by Kraft who, in borrowing words from Hippocrates, stated that the Wesselhoefts brought to medicine: “… a natural disposition … leisure … a natural talent … a love of labour and perseverance, so that the instruction taking root may bring forth proper and abundant fruits.”²⁵

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to Dianne Wesselhoeft, Caroline Williams, Conrad Wesselhoeft IV, Rikke Wesselhoeft, and A’Llyn Ettien for their helpful comments, for providing information and source materials.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

Financial Disclosure for past 12 months: Consulting income from Edgemont Pharmaceuticals, Tonix Pharmaceuticals, Lundbeck, Turing, University of California San Diego (Data Safety & Monitoring Board, INTRuST Consortium). Royalties from Guilford Publications, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, MultiHealth Systems Inc (Davidson Trauma Scale), Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) and Mini-SPIN.

Author biography

Jonathan RT Davidson, is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA, where he was appointed to the faculty in 1978.

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