KARIN FIGALA, 1938-2007

摘要

The community of historians of alchemy and chemistry—and our community of historians of science more generally—deplores the death of Karin Figala, the charming emeritus head of the Institute for History of Technology of Munich's Technical University. Figala was born in 1938 in Vienna, the daughter of an industrial chemist and pharmacist employed by the local branch of Knoll's Pharmaceutical Industries. Her greatgrandfather Figala had been a pharmacist in Radovic, Slovenia, which in those days was known as Radmannsdorf and was part of Austria. After World War II, her father having been wounded, the family moved to Frankfurt to take refuge with grandfather Figala. After high school in Frankfurt, Karin Figala enrolled, in 1960, as a student of pharmacy and nutrients chemistry, taking classes at the universities of Bern, Bonn, and Hamburg. Those were years of the utmost poverty for a regenerating West Germany, and even food was an object of daily concern. The frail student Figala bought "sausages for the dog" at the butcher's—which sausages ended up on her own plate. In mid-1966 she embarked on a history of pharmacy project under Gunter Kallinich at Munich's Technical University. The project resulted, in March 1969, in an "inaugural dissertation" devoted to the distinguished scholar and shining personality as Karin Figala.