author
Karl Arnold Kortum
1745–1824
Best known as a doctor who also became a much-loved comic writer, this 18th-century German author mixed sharp humor with a keen eye for everyday life. His most famous work, Die Jobsiade, kept his name alive long after his medical career ended.
1 Audiobook
Die Jobsiade: Ein komisches Heldengedicht in drei Teilen
by Karl Arnold Kortum
About the author
Born in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1745, Carl Arnold Kortum studied medicine in Duisburg and went on to work as a physician in Bochum from 1771 until his death in 1824. Alongside his medical practice, he wrote poetry, satire, and scholarly works, building a reputation that reached well beyond his hometown.
He is especially remembered for Die Jobsiade (1784), a comic mock-heroic poem that became his best-known book. Its playful, satirical spirit made it popular with generations of readers and helped secure his place in German literary history.
Kortum was more than a literary humorist. Sources also describe him as a local historian and an unusually wide-ranging thinker with interests that reached into natural philosophy and other fields of study. That mix of practical doctor, curious scholar, and witty writer gives his work a distinctive charm even today.