21 August 2009

Bredgade 62 - Residence of Christian Bohr 

Our physical tour of Copenhagen starts at Bredgade 62, the building of the former Kirurgisk Akademi (Academy of Surgery), which was established in 1785 and completed in 1787.

It became the residence of Christian Bohr (1855-1911), when he moved into Bredgade 62 in 1886 as senior lecturer at the University of Copenhagen; he was appointed professor of physiology in 1890.

Bredgade 62. Courtesy of the Niels Bohr Archive.

Since 1948 Bredgade 62 has been the home of the Museum of Medical History, recently renamed Medical Museion, which is part of the University of Copenhagen's Institute of Public Health. It was the childhood home of Jenny (1883-1933), Niels (1885-1962) and Harald Bohr (1887-1951). Niels Bohr lived here until he received his doctorate in 1911. Before then he attended Gammelholm School a few streets away, and after 1903 he studied physics at the University of Copenhagen.

Niels Bohr was used to working in his father's physiology laboratory in a building behind the Academy of Surgery, and it was here as a student that he made the experiments to determine the surface tension of liquids for which in 1907 he won a gold medal for a prize investigation announced by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, applying a method proposed by Lord Rayleigh in 1879. His paper was published in English in 1909 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. This was his first published paper, and the only one reporting Bohr's own experimental work.

Medical Museion: http://www.museion.ku.dk/

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