[100th anniversary of the Institute of Public Health at the Greifswald University]

The presented study reports on the history and development of the Institute of Hygiene at the University of Greifswald, which was founded in 1888. The first decades of this Institute were shaped by the assistant of Robert Koch, Friedrich Loeffler (1852-1915), an important microbiologist and one of the founders of virology. After 1945 under new social and political conditions specially the Social Hygiene and Occupational Medicine have been expanded and taken up into the lectures. In 1959 the Chair of Microbiology became the status as an own institute. In further development separate chairs of General and Communal Hygiene, Social Hygiene, Occupational Medicine were founded and till 1964 as a particularity of Greifswald a chair of Rural Medicine too. In 1985 these chairs also received status of institutes.