Aerospace medicine in Germany: from the very beginnings

The roots of German Aerospace Medicine are in Berlin. High altitude research was performed by physiologists like Nathan Zuntz and the very first Army flight surgeons, Koschel and Flemming. With the founding of the Scientific Society for Aeronautics in 1912, a medical committee was established to determine guidelines for the physical examination of flyers. In World War I aviation medicine became a military science, which came to an end with the Treaty of Versailles. In 1927, with the establishment of the first Aeromedical Institute in Hamburg, Ludolph Brauer restarted the civilian academic aeromedical research effort, which, thereafter, fell more and more under military influence. At the end of World War II, German scientists were invited to work at the USAAF Aero Medical Center (AMC) in Heidelberg (1945-47), to gather the results of German aeromedical research performed before and during the war. Some of this group of German scientists were invited to work in the USA. In Germany, on the other hand, the effect of this "brain drain" was a period of stagnation. In the 1950's, a new civilian institute of aviation medicine was established in Bonn. It grew to be the nucleus of the DLR Institute of Aviation Medicine in Cologne. The German Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine was founded in Fuerstenfeldruck in 1959, and in the GDR the Institute of Aviation Medicine was established in 1961: the first East German cosmonaut S. Jaehn 1978 (Soyuz-31), was succeeded by the first West German astronaut, U. Merbold in 1983 (Spacelab).