Erich Saling

Erich Saling (21 July 1925 – 6 November 2021) was a pioneering German gynaecologist and midwifery professional. Many sources identify him as "the father of perinatal medicine": one even identifies him as the originator of the term "perinatal medicine". He was involved in a number of "firsts", among which the most frequently cited occurred in 1960 when he used blood gas analyses to assess the effectiveness of resuscitation procedures in respect of new-born infants. In 1961 Saling teamed up with K. Damaschke to develop a high-speed approach to testing for perinatal blood-oxygen levels and foetal blood analysis.

Life Erich Saling was born in the city known, at that time, as Stanislau, at that time a multi-ethnic city in Poland. (In 1939 the city and surrounding region became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. ) His father, Heinrich Saling , worked in forestry as a regional manager. It seems to have been from his father that Erich Saling inherited or learned a valuable set of hands-on craft skills. The family were registered as Protestants.

Saling passed his "Abitur" (school leaving exam) in or before 1943, which in normal times would have opened the way to university admission, but the times were far from normal. Between 1943 and 1945 he was conscripted for military service. This was also the year in which Saling obtained his professional "Approbation" in Berlin, receiving his doctorate from the Free University of (West) Berlin that same year. His doctoral dissertation concerned "Syphilis as a cause of premature births and miscarriages" ("Lues als Abort- und Frühgeburtsursache"). At the end of 1952 he embarked on his mandatory hands-on probationary posting ("Pflichtassistentenzeit") at the City Hospital (as the "Vivantes Clinic" was known at that time) in Berlin-Neukölln. That was followed in 1968 with an extraordinary ("außerplanmäßig") professorship. It was not until 1976, however, that he was appointed head of the Free University's Institute for Perinatal Medicine and head of Obstetrics at the Neukölln City Hospital. Following reunification and the ensuring restructuring of university medicine in Berlin Erich Saling became University Professor for Perinatal Medicine for the greatly expanded Charité hospital network. In 1991, however, having passed the age of 65, he retired from his career in the university hierarchy, succeeded in his university professorship by Klaus Vetter. His contributions to medical research in the field of obstetrics were not quite an end, however.

The pioneer Erich Saling repeatedly developed new methods of early problem identification and treatment procedures designed to reduced infant mortality and preterm birth levels. In 1958, for instance, he catheterized the aorta of a new-born infant directly following birth and developed a new method for faster placental blood transfusion with early cord cutting. It was in 1960 that he first used blood gas analyses to assess the effectiveness of resuscitation procedures for new-born infants. In 1978 he introduced continual vaginal disinfectant measures in order to avoid ascending infections in the event of amniorrhexis during later-stage pregnancy. That was also the year in which, together with his colleague U. Blücher, he came up with a device for monitoring premature labour in the home from a distance - in this case a hospital or clinic - using a telephone. In 1984, together with U. Blücher and J. Rothe, Erich Saling created microphone recordings of the acoustic background context of the Uterus during childbirth.