Prof. Dr.med. Artur Schüller

Marriage record http://www.badatelna.eu/fond/1073/reprodukce/?zaznamId=170&reproId=... BRNO 131/128

Appears in the Avotaynu list of Austrians holding bank accounts at the time of the Holocaust:

• Schüller, Arthur 28.12.1874

Appears in Resignations from the Jewish Faith (genteam.at):

• 1890 Schüller Dr. Arthur b. 1874.12.28

Ancestry.com. Australia, Death Index, 1787-1985 states death location as Fitzroy, Victoria.

Dr. Arthur Schüller (1874–1957) was an Austrian neuroradiologist and Head of the Clinic for Nervous Diseases at the Franz Joseph Ambulatorium in Vienna. In 1906 he described an oblique view of the mastoid bones (tube angled 25° caudally), which is used mainly for assessment of trauma and pneumatization of the temporal bones. His name is part of a syndrome titled “Hand-Schüller-Christian disease,” which is associated with the skull defects that he described. In addition, in 1905 he published a book, The Skull Base on the Radiogram, in which he described several projections of the skull base. [http://radiology.rsna.org/content/218/1/15.full]

Arthur Schüller is described in Imaging of Bone Tumors and Tumor-like Lesions: Techniques and Applications ed. Arthur Mark Davies, Murali Sundaram, Steven L. J. James. Schüller was born 1874 in Brno, died 1857 in Melbourne. In England 1938-39. Then in Australia. "Two sons were not able to escape Austria."

[onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-1673.1959 OBITUARY]: ARTHUR SCHULLER. Professor A. Schuller, of Vienna, died on October 31, 1957, in St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne [Australia].

Re Schüller children, see the GENI page on their grandmother, Friederike Stiassni. On her Theresienstadt death record (4/19/1942) the names of three relatives appear: Hans & Berta Schüller, Enkel, and Julie Stiassny, Schwagerin.

Schüller was the subject of an article entitled "Arthur Schüller: pioneer of neuroradiology," by E. Schindler, published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology:

The centennial celebration of the discovery of X-rays was last year, and the first radiograms of the skull were made one hundred years ago. Thus, it is appropriate to remember Arthur Schüller, who was “without any shadow of doubt the father of neuroradiology”. His biography can be considered an example of the fate of many scientists in our century.

Arthur Schüller was born in Brünn, in the north of Vienna, in 1874. His ancestors were merchants and industrialists, and his father was an otorhinolaryngologist. At the age of 17, Schüller came to Vienna to study medicine. It is a coincidental twist of fate that the very day that Wilhelm C. Röntgen (1845-1923) submitted his famous preliminary communication, “About a New Kind of Rays”, to the Society of Physics and Medicine in Würzburg, Germany (Saturday, December 28th, 1895), Schüller celebrated his 21st birthday and attained his majority. Those new kind of rays would considerably influence his professional life. Four years later, on November 5th, 1899, he was graduated with the highest honors from Vienna University; because of his outstanding performance, he became a doctor of medicine “sub auspiciis imperatoris,” namely, a doctor under the patronage of the emperor Franz Joseph, who awarded this distinction only twice during his 68-year reign.

Dr Schüller began his medical career in the field of neuropsychiatry. His first masters were Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840 –1902), a pioneer of research on sexual behavioral disorders, and Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940), honored with the Nobel Prize in 1927 for having developed malaria therapy against syphilis. Thus Schüller’s first publications dealt with the clinical application of a soporific (4) and with maniacal jealousy in women (5). It was Wagner-Jauregg who paved the way not only for the acceptance of “medical radiology” by the Vienna University early in our century but also for the cooperation between neuropsychiatry and radiology. . . . In 1905 his first book, The Skull Base on the Radiogram, was published. It was a comprehensive description of normal and pathologic anatomy as well as of many special radioprojections of the skull base, which confirmed Schüller’s excellent anatomic knowledge as well as his systematic diligence.

The subsequent years brought happiness and success. One could say that Fortune smiled on Schüller during the fourth decade of his life. In December 1906, he married Margarete Stiassni. A few months later he achieved the status of university lecturer (venia docendi). His son Franz Ferdinand was born in 1908, and a second son, Hans Heinrich, followed in 1909. In 1912 Schüller’s second monograph, Röntgen Diagnosis of Diseases of the Head, was published. It became the standard textbook then and during the whole “classic era” of neuroradiology; its English translation appeared in 1918.

[By then] the Austro-Hungarian empire had perished, and Vienna was no longer a significant European center of art and culture but a seedy town crowded with impoverished and desperate people, as well as thousands of war disabled who suffered from famine and infectious diseases. The inflation that consequently developed was devastating to nearly everyone and wrecked the economic efforts of the new Austria, the small state that was the remnant of the former empire. As a result of the escalating inflation, Schüller lost his financial stability, as Frank Morgan (1906 -1988) mentions in Schüller’s obituary, one of the most warm-hearted and poignant memorials in the medical literature. Nevertheless, scientific activities, particularly the efficiency of the Vienna Medical School, were not damaged by the war . . . he was an excellent teacher who was famous for his professional expertise, and whose English was perfect (note in his personal dossier from the University of Vienna).

Despite this amount of daily work, Schüller did not neglect cultural life; he was a gifted violinist and member of the Vienna Doctors’ Orchestra. Felix Fleischner remembers that “he and his wife used to enjoy playing duosonatas."

There is no doubt that in the 1930s, Professor Schüller was famous everywhere in the medical world and highly esteemed as a neuroradiologic expert in Vienna. He regularly contributed to the renowned sessions of the Viennese Society of Physicians, whose meeting place and auditorium lay just around the corner from his home. And he frequently published in the Viennese medical journals that still had, at that time, a high level of scientific integrity and a large circulation. His last paper there appeared on February 26, 1938, and was on radiologic findings of epilepsy in children. There he mentioned that there were “countries with regulations referring to the prevention of offspring with hereditary defects.” Exactly two weeks later, the Nazis, whose “solution” to such hereditary defects was murder, entered Austria. After the annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany, Arthur and Margarete Schüller were forced to flee Vienna at the ages of 64 and 52, respectively. It is not known how their sons were “at the last moment prevented from leaving Austria.”

Oxford, England, was the first place of rest for the emigrating Schüllers. Fortunately, they had substantial help from Alfred E. Barclay (1876- 1949), who was the doyen of British radiology... Several reasons seem to have moved Schüller to choose Australia as the endpoint of his emigration. Bitterly disappointed with Europe and terrified of the Nazis, he wanted to stay as far away as possible. America, he said, “was too close to Europe” (K. Henderson, personal communication). It was most likely Alfred Barclay who recommended that Schüller go so far; Barclay was for years the representative for the Australian and New Zealand Association of Radiologists on the Council of the British Institute of Radiology and had the best connections with radiologic colleagues there... The Schüllers arrived in Australia late in 1939. Although they were welcomed warmly by Australian colleagues, it was difficult for the Schüllers to begin a new life in a strange land with a different culture. They settled in Melbourne and found a home in a suburb named, in an ironic twist, Heidelberg. Apparently, their financial means were limited, since Margarete Schüller “went into people’s homes as a domestic, mainly ironing and cooking, almost from the time of their arrival in Australia up until a year or two before her death” (K. Henderson, personal communication). Her husband, however, pur- sued his chosen career. He found work in the X-ray department of St Vincent’s Hospital (Fitzroy, Melbourne), and was seen as “the most helpful, charming and valuable colleague that one could wish to have” (9). For some years Schüller also worked in the X-ray department of the Repatriation Hospital (Heidelberg, Melbourne).

It was some time after the war ended when the Schüllers received confirmation that their sons were dead. They were, like innumerable Jews, “exterminated in a Nazi concentration camp,” as Franz Freund has written in his obituary for Schüller. Thus the desperate hope of the Schüllers was destroyed by this most dreadful stroke of fate, which heavily overshadowed their remaining years. Arthur Schüller became severely depressed . . . but proved once again his generosity and submitted his next-to-last paper for publication to an Australian medical journal.

Arthur Schüller died on Thursday, October 31, 1957, at St Vincent’s Hospital, where he had so many friends. The funeral was two days later in Heidelberg, Australia. Margarete Schüller, an admirable and valiant woman, survived her husband by more than 14 years [to Feb. 27, 1972]. She died at the age of 85 and was buried in the same resting place as her husband. On their tombstone the date of his decease. After her death there was no one left who could remember the exact date of Arthur Schüller’s death.