Research Catalog

Medicine and the German Jews : a history / John M. Efron.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	R694 .E376 2001	Off-site

Description

viii, 343 p. : ill.; 25 cm.

Summary

"John Efron examines the rise of the German Jewish physician in the Middle Ages and his emergence as a new kind of secular, Jewish intellectual in the early modern period and beyond. The author shows how nineteenth-century medicine regarded Jews as possessing distinct physical and mental pathologies, which in turn led to the emergence in modern Germany of the "Jewish body" as a cultural and scientific idea.
"Medicine played an important role in the early secularization and eventual modernization of German Jewish culture. And as both physicians and patients, Jews exerted a great influence on the formation of modern medical discourse and practice. This fascinating book investigates the relationship between German Jews and medicine from medieval times until its demise under the Nazis.".
He demonstrates why Jews flocked to the medical profession in Germany and Austria, noting that by 1933, 50 percent of Berlin's and 60 percent of Vienna's physicians were Jewish. He discusses the impact of this on Jewish and German culture, concluding with the fate of Jewish doctors under the Nazis, whose assault on them was designed to eliminate whatever intimacy had been built up between Germans and their Jewish doctors over the centuries."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

ISBN

0300083777 (alk. paper)

LCCN

00011315

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries