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. His mother, born Emma Hoffmann, had been born in Stanislau region, albeit during the nineteenth century when it was part of the Austrian province of Galicia (Eastern Europe). 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. In 1945 he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Jena, which after 1945 found itself administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic / East Germany). Between 1945 and 1952 he studied at Jena and at Berlin.
In 1952 Erich Saling married fellow-physician Hella Weymann. 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. He continued to be based in Neukölln between 1954 and 1958, working as an assistant hospital doctor while training in Gynaecology and Midwifery at the (then separate) Neukölln Women's Clinic.
In 1958 Saling qualified in the specialisms of Gynaecology and Midwifery. During the post-war period these were not fashionable specialisms among junior doctors, and Saling had demonstrated a certain level of stubborn persistence in getting to this point. At the same time he embarked on what became a new life-long research programme in various complementary and over-lapping forms of perinatal medicine. While still in the final phase of his training period he had applied his hands-on craft skills to constructing a simple machine that could both blow oxygen into the lungs of new-born infants and suck out mucus from their breathing systems. He also "discovered the foetus as a patient", deserving of treatment, rather than simply as an after-effect of pregnancy. His expression of that attitude, subsequently mainstream, would have given many more traditionalist colleagues pause for thought. His radical attitudes in this respect were on public display in his first book "Das Kind im Bereich der Geburtshilfe" (loosely, "The Child in the context of obstetrics"): he was acutely conscious that "the period around an individual's birth is the most dangerous stage of life". Saling never got weary of reiterating this truth as he expanded his teaching activities, which, according to his many fans in the field, prior generations of doctors had a tendency to ignore.