The Jewish contribution to medicine Part 11. The 19th and 20th centuries

Despite the opening of German universities to Jews in the 1860s, they were restricted to fields not attractive to their gentile colleagues, e.g. the basic sciences, dermatology, psychiatry, neurology, paediatrics and venereology. They pioneered these specialties when the latter were still in their infancies and made fundamental discoveries. This brilliant period of Jewish medicine in Germany included the renowned immunologists Ehrlich and Wassermann and neurologists Romberg and Freud. Eminent workers from France were Metchnikoff, who discovered phagocytosis, Haffkine for his plague vaccine and Widal, who discovered bacterial. agglutination. Chain, the biochemist, shared the Nobel Prize for medicine for his part in the discovery of penicillin in England