Dr. Robert Matthias Hofstätter

Why he matters

The history of the Vienna Medical School in the twentieth century is often told through the lens of exile — the departure of Sigmund Freud, the expulsion of Otto Marburg, the diaspora of medical genius that enriched Anglo-American universities while hollowing out Vienna. But understanding that era also requires examining those who stayed. ^[S22]

Robert Matthias Hofstätter stayed. A gynecologist of considerable technical standing, he was a product of the classic Viennese education — MD in 1907, at the faculty’s zenith — and became the custodian of pineal gland research after the man who inspired it was forced to flee. His career spans the Austro-Hungarian twilight, two republics, a fascist interregnum, and a Nazi occupation. The regimes changed; his prescription did not. ^[S22]

For this family, Robert Matthias Hofstätter is a great-great-grandfather. His son Peter became Germany’s leading postwar psychologist. Peter’s daughter Nadina married Dr. Clifford Goodman Jr. in Arizona. The geographic chain — Vienna to Hamburg to Chandler — represents a specific historical trajectory that brought Austrian intellectual culture into the American Southwest.

The formation of a Viennese physician

To be born in Vienna in 1883 was to arrive in a city becoming the intellectual capital of Europe. By the time Hofstätter entered the University of Vienna at the turn of the century, the Medical Faculty was the undisputed global center of medical science — an environment characterized by therapeutic nihilism (the idea that diagnosis mattered more than treatment) but also by daring experimentation in surgery and the nascent field of endocrinology. ^[S22]

He received his MD in 1907, placing him in the same generational cohort as the “Second Viennese Medical School” luminaries. After graduation, Hofstätter specialized in gynecology and surgery at the Wiener Allgemeine Poliklinik (Vienna General Polyclinic) — a more dynamic institution than the rigid General Hospital, serving both the city’s indigent population and advanced clinical research. ^[S22]

It was here, amid the Poliklinik’s interdisciplinary ferment, that Hofstätter drifted from the mechanics of surgery into the mysteries of the endocrine system. ^[S22]

Otto Marburg and the pineal obsession

The defining intellectual relationship of Hofstätter’s career was not with a fellow gynecologist but with a neurologist: Otto Marburg (1874–1948), head of the Neurological Institute and a titan of the Vienna Medical School. ^[S22]

In the early twentieth century, the function of the pineal gland remained largely mysterious — René Descartes had called it “the seat of the soul,” but anatomists struggled to find its physiological purpose. Marburg championed a bold theory: the pineal gland acted as a biological brake on sexual development. It secreted a substance that inhibited the pituitary gland and the gonads. Premature puberty was a brake failure; delayed puberty, an overactive brake. ^[S22]

While Marburg studied brain sections and tumor pathology, Hofstätter looked at his female patients and saw clinical manifestations of pineal dysregulation. He did not merely observe — he intervened, introducing pineal gland extracts into treatment, attempting to restore the “brake” that Marburg had theorized. ^[S22]

The Epiphysan years

The primary vehicle for Hofstätter’s therapeutic ambitions was Epiphysan-Richter, an aqueous extract produced by the Hungarian pharmaceutical firm Gedeon Richter. Each dose contained the extract of 0.1 grams of fresh bovine pineal gland. ^[S22]

Hofstätter became the leading proponent of Epiphysan in human medicine. He applied it to conditions ranging from premenstrual complaints to what the medical language of the era called “sexual hyperexcitability.” He claimed that by 1936, twenty-one other authors had confirmed the positive effects of pineal extracts. Later in his career, he explored the extract’s potential to inhibit tumor growth — reasoning that if the pineal gland could brake the rapid development of puberty, it might also brake the rapid cell division of cancer. ^[S22]

Modern retrospective analysis reveals significant methodological limitations. “Positive effects” were often anecdotal or based on subjective reporting. And there was a glaring contradiction in his model: premature puberty appeared almost exclusively in boys in the clinical literature, yet his therapeutic interventions targeted women. Hofstätter noted this contradiction but never resolved it — suggesting his use of Epiphysan was shaped as much by social norms regarding female sexuality as by rigorous pathophysiology. ^[S22]

The Anschluss: destruction and promotion

The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 shattered the Vienna Medical School. The racial laws led to the immediate dismissal of all Jewish faculty. The Medical Faculty lost more than half its staff — an intellectual decapitation from which it arguably never recovered. ^[S22]

For the pineal research group, the impact was devastating. Otto Marburg was Jewish. He was forced to flee Austria immediately, escaping to the United States. The Neurological Institute was “practically destroyed,” and the organized, institutional research into the pineal gland in Austria collapsed. ^[S22]

The research materials do not contain a specific party membership number for Robert Hofstätter. But his elevation to a leadership role during the height of the “Aryanization” of Vienna’s hospitals places him among the beneficiaries of the regime’s personnel policies. He became the custodian of the pineal theory in a city that had expelled its founder. ^[S22]

A family torn across continents

The domestic dimension of Robert Hofstätter’s life mirrored the turbulence of the century. He had married Josephine Marie Heller; they had one child, Peter, born in 1913. The marriage ended in divorce, and Josephine remarried Fritz Johann Hansgirg (1891–1949), a brilliant chemist who invented the carbothermic magnesium reduction process. ^[S22]

By the late 1930s, the family was scattered across the globe: Robert in Vienna, treating patients and climbing the hospital hierarchy. His son Peter in the Wehrmacht, testing conscripts as a military psychologist. His ex-wife Josephine and her new husband in the United States, where Hansgirg — despite anti-Nazi sentiments — was arrested and interned as an enemy alien after Pearl Harbor. ^[S22]

In a desperate appeal, Josephine wrote directly to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, pleading for Fritz’s release. Her argument was agonizing: Fritz could not publicly criticize Hitler because their son Peter was in the German Army and would suffer retaliation. The mother in America pleading loyalty. The stepfather interned as a potential spy. The son actually serving in the Wehrmacht in Europe, used as leverage to silence the parents abroad. Robert in Vienna, the silent anchor of the old life. ^[S22]

The man who stayed

The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 brought ruin to many, but Robert Hofstätter faced no apparent professional retribution. He continued to practice and publish in Vienna. In 1950, he published a significant paper in the Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift on the pineal gland — effectively reviving the topic in the Austrian medical press after the silence of the immediate postwar years. ^[S22]

He remained scientifically active well into his seventies and eighties. His later research shifted toward the pituitary gland’s role in obstetrics, but the pineal gland remained his lifelong fixation. The regimes changed; the prescription did not.

Robert Matthias Hofstätter died in Vienna on August 19, 1970, at the age of 87. He was survived by his son Peter, then at the peak of his academic power at the University of Hamburg. ^[S22]

What his life illuminates

Robert Hofstätter was not a revolutionary. He was a keeper of the flame. When the science of Otto Marburg was banned and its author exiled, Hofstätter did not abandon the theory. He carried it forward, protecting the “pineal brake” hypothesis within the safe harbor of his gynecological practice — through the monarchy, the First Republic, the Austrofascists, the Nazis, and the Second Republic. ^[S22]

The dual biography of father and son also illustrates a shift in the “technology of control” across the twentieth century. Robert represented the early-century belief in somatic control — the idea that human behavior could be tamed by extracting fluids from glands and injecting them into the body. Peter represented the mid-century belief in social control — that behavior could be understood through group dynamics, polls, and psychological testing. From hormones to opinion surveys: two generations, one impulse.

For the Goodman-Hofstätter descendants, Robert Matthias is the figure who anchors the European medical lineage. The Goodman side traces medicine back to Dr. William Erastus Platt and the frontier drugstores of Pima and Safford. The Hofstätter side traces it to the University of Vienna and a gynecology professor who published on the pineal gland under five different governments. Both lines converge in the marriage of Nadina and Clifford Jr. — Vienna’s intellectual tradition meeting Arizona’s pioneer pragmatism.