Medicine in Theresienstadt

Illness was a defining experience for prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and ghettos, and yet their medical history is missing; a startling lacuna, given the extensive research into medicine and the Holocaust. This article studies the medical staff, patients, and diseases in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In examining medical care in extremis, it studies how the Central European Jewish doctors succeeded in providing comparably excellent health care for the inmates. The article studies the mentality, experience, and the gendered power mechanisms that characterized the medical staff, the agency of the doctors, as well as the hierarchies they assigned to patients. Finally, in exploring how the prisoner physicians made sense of Theresienstadt as a part of their medical career, I show what kind of historical protagonists are doctors