Reinhard Hoeppli (1893-1973): The life and curious afterlife of a distinguished parasitologist.

Abstract

Reinhard Hoeepli was a Swiss-German physician with a distinguished career as a researcher and historian of medical parasitology. He spent the majority of his career at the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, China, where he undertook research on host responses to parasitic infections, in particular describing the 'Splendore-Hoeppli phenomenon', between 1929 and 1952. During the Second World War, he acted as the Swiss honorary Consul in Japanese-occupied Beijing. After leaving China following the militarization of the College in the wake of the Korean War, he subsequently worked in Singapore and Liberia before retiring to Switzerland. Hoeppli is most widely known for his association with Sir Edmund Backhouse, a controversial and enigmatic Chinese scholar, who was his war-time patient towards the end of his life. With Hoeppli's encouragement, Backhouse wrote two scandalous and unpublishable memoirs which remained in Hoeppli's safe-keeping until his own death in 1973. However, the revelations by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1976 that Backhouse was a fraudster and fantasist has had a detrimental effect on Hoeppli's posthumous reputation that has overshadowed his many lifetime achievements. Alongside a biography of his life, an examination of the controversies of the Backhouse revelations on Hoeppli's repute is presented.