Profile of Dr Udo Schirmer

Dr Udo Schirmer was born in 1930 near Berlin. In 1936 he became a pupil in a two-form-school in Upper Silesia until 1940 when his family moved to Poznan. There he attended a secondary school and grow up in the Red Cross military hospital managed by his parents until the end of World War II. After that war and some years after reaching the A-level at secondary school he studied medicine at Gottingen University. After graduation he worked in different medical specialities from obstetrics to geriatrics until 1970 when his wife, their son, and he settled in their present home and surgery in the open country.

Ten years later he conferred a doctor's degree on medicine at the Hannover Medical School and he has been a lecturer for general practice there since then. His message to the students is that each patient needs one doctor who knows all about them and the family no less than other specialists. He conceives of the auditory not being all qualified for GP professionals and of the patients' need for other specialists. That means to design his lectures to be interesting both for future specialists and future GPs.