Karl Adolph Knorre 1799 - 1870

**Karl Adolph Knorre **1799 - 1870 was an Estonian orthodox physician who converted to homeopathy

Knorre was a student of Samuel Hahnemann, and a member of Samuel Hahnemann’s Prover’s Union.

Knorre practiced in Parnu.

Karl Adolph Knorre was one of the pioneers of Homeopathy at Parnu, in Estonia. He was a contributor to the Hahnemann Jubilee of 1829. His name is on the Zeitung list of 1832, and on that of 1834 of Frederick Hervey Foster Quin.

In Parnu there were two homeopathic physicians in the second half of the 19th century: Dr Carl Adolph Knorre (†1870) who defended his dissertation in Tartu in 1822, and Friedrich Gottlieb Landesen, who ran his medical practice for nearly 50 years as a homeopath before he retired. He, like his colleague, held a medical doctorate from the University of Tartu.

The Knorre family were educated, prosperous and famous for astronomers:

The story of the Knorre family starts in Haldensleben, a small town near Magdeburg in Saxony. There, at the beginning of the 18th century, was recorded the first Knorre, Matthias Georg, a printer by trade. His son Johann Friedrich became a brewer and the head of the merchants’ guild of Haldensleben where he spent all his life. But he had two adventurous sons who took the initiative to move east at the end of the 18th century and settled down in a province then called Livonia, part of present Estonia…

… Outside of astronomers and engineers and builders, there were other professional categories represented in the Knorre family. I want especially to refer now to three members of the medical dynasty founded in Parnu by Karl Adolph Knorre. Born in Dorpat in 1799, he was the elder brother of Karl Knorre.

Karl Adolph Knorre studied medicine at Dorpat University and then practiced his art for fifty years as city physician of Parnu. With his wife Julie, born von Harder, they had nine children and thus initiated the so called Parnu line of the Knorre family. They shared the same blazon as the Nikolayev line, except for a green aconite branch with blue flowers, symbolizing medicine, that was added in the paws of the griffin.

Karl Adolph Knorre’s eldest son, born in 1827 and called Adolf Friedrich Knorre (also a homeopath), also studied medicine at Dorpat University. Then he moved to the province of Saratov where he acted successively as country doctor, Director of the Alexander hospital in Saratov, and army doctor first in a Hussar regiment, then in an infantry regiment. Adolf Friedrich Knorre, too, had nine children, among them a son, Nikolai, who studied medicine and became a district doctor in the province of Saratov.

In the Nikolayev line of the family, it is also fair to mention a prominent physician. His name was Woldemar or Vladimir. He was the third son of Karl Knorre, the astronomer and his second wife Dorothea. Born in Odessa in 1838, he studied medicine at Dorpat University where he belonged to the ancient and famous student fraternity “Livonia”. He started his career in the Navy as an assistant doctor aboard a ship of the Black Sea Fleet. Later he worked as anatomist-pathologist at the Nikolayev Navy Hospital, then director of the Nikolayev City Hospital. In December 1893, he was promoted to the rank of actual State Counsellor and appointed surgeon aboard the flagship of the Baltic Sea Fleet, based in Kronstadt. After a life time dedicated to both medicine and the Navy, he died in 1901 in Riga, not far from his hometown Dorpat.

Knorre submitted cases and articles to various homepathic publications.