Ferdinand Mainzer

Ferdinand Mainzer (16 January 1871 – 3 January 1943) was a German-Jewish gynaecologist and historical author.

Lovis Corinth: Portrait of Dr. Ferdinand Mainzer (1899)

Born 16 January 1871,^[1] Mainzer wrote his doctoral dissertation on wandering spleen. In the 1890s he worked at the Berlin clinic of the gynecologist Leopold Landau.^[2][3]

Mainzer had artistic connections and historical interests. He married Gertrud Sabersky, a student of the artist Walter Leistikow, and his own portrait was painted by Lovis Corinth in 1899.^[4] After a hand injury meant that he could no longer perform surgery, he turned to writing about antiquity.^[5] He was interested in numismatics, and a friend of the numismatist Edward Gans.^[6] His biography of Julius Caesar was translated into French and English, and widely reviewed. The book inspired Thornton Wilder to write his own novel about Caesar, The Ides of March.^[7]

Mainzer was a close friend of the Catholic priest Friedrich von Erxleben, who was a member of the Solf Circle of intellectuals involved in the resistance against Nazism.^[5] Mainzer and his family were helped to escape to England by the daughter of Wilhelm and Hanna Solf, the Countess So'oa'emalelagi "Lagi" von Ballestrem-Solf, who escorted them with their jewellery hidden in the lining of her clothes.^[8]

Mainzer died 3 January 1943^[1][9] in Los Angeles.^[10] His daughter Lucie Manén married Otto John in 1949.^[11] He also had a son Max Mainzer (1902–1987) who married Eva Perlis (1908–2006). In May 2021, a portrait of Ferdinand Mainzer by Lovis Corinth was accepted for the nation in lieu of a UK inheritance tax bill.^[12] Corinth also painted a portrait of Max entitled Max Mainzer with a Siberian Greyhound (1912).

Works

• Wandermilz und Splenektomie, München: J. F. Lehmann, 1892
• 'Das Dekadrachmon von Athen', Zeitschrift für Numismatik, vol. 36 (1926), pp. 37–54
• Siciliana aus griechisch-römischer Zeit, Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1930.
• Clodia: Politik und Liebe auf dem Palatin, Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1931.
• Der Kampf um Caesars Erbe, Leipzig: E.P. Tal, 1934. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul as Caesar's mantle; the end of the Roman republic, New York: Viking, 1936.