Commentary: In memoriam of my father, Prof. Dr. med. Dietrich Eberhard Schairer

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Abstract
My father, Professor Dr. med. Dietrich Eberhard Schairer, was born at Oberrot (Southern Germany) on 21 February 1907 as the first son of a medical practitioner. In 1925 he passed the Abitur at the Dillmann-Realgymnasium at Stuttgart. He then started to study medicine at the University of Tübingen, where he passed the ‘Physikum’ (basic sciences exam at the end of the first year) in 1927. He continued to study medicine at the universities of Berlin, Freiburg (where he completed his doctoral thesis1) and Hamburg, where he passed the medical state exam in 1930. After medical training at the Universities of Cologne and later at the German Hospital in London he was houseman at the Protestant Hospital at Hattingen (North Rhine-Westphalia). Between 1932 and 1938 my father was tutorial assistant and later assistant at the Institute for Pathology of the University of Tübingen with Professor Dietrich. In 1935 he qualified as a university lecturer with his postdoctoral thesis ‘Size determination of nuclei and determination of the number of chromosomes in human tumours’.2,3 Between 1938 and 1945 my father was a senior assistant and temporarily deputy director of the Institute for Pathology of the University of Jena under the directorship of Professor Gerlach. In 1943 he was appointed Professor. His work at the University of Jena was interrupted between 1939 and 1940 because he had to do military service and again in 1944 when he was sent to the eastern front as consultant pathologist. The last days of his stay at the crumbling east front are mentioned in Peter Bamm's book ‘Die unsichtbare Flagge’.4 He was then a prisoner of war under the British. During this time he was employed as a pathologist in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein. At the end of 1945 he was released from captivity. In 1946 he took over my grandfather's general practice in the village of Loßburg, in the Black Forest. In 1951 he set up his own practice as a pathologist and medical microbiologist in Ulm where he finally set up his own institute in 1962. At the end of 1977 he retired from his pathological practice. From 1985 my father suffered from progressive dementia. After the death of my mother he was cared for in the family home of his daughter Ursula Hirrlinger at Bad Waldsee (Southern Germany) where he died on 23 January 1996, a few weeks before his 89th birthday.