Jewish contributions to MEDICINE IN SOUTH AFRICA
by DR. LOUIS HERRMAN
THE profession of medicine has always been held in the
highest esteem by Jews throughout their long history. "Honour the
physician according to thy need with the honours due unto him, wrote Ben
Sirach, nearly two centuries before the Christian era, in his poem
"Ecclesiasticus, and he proceeds to devote the ten verses following to the
praise of the healing art. From antiquity, through the Middle Ages, down to the
present day, Jews have continued to honour the physician: and in every land.
where Jews are found in appreciable numbers, medicine still retains its
traditional favour amongst them as a chosen profession or an object of
scientific enquiry.
In South Africa, Western culture has but a brief history,
and that part of it during which any considerable number of Jews has formed a
section of its civilised population extends over little more than a century.
But in the course of that century their contributions to general medical
practice, to specialisation, to medical literature and journalism and to
medical research and teaching, or in the form of benefactions to medicine, are
at least comparable to those of other sections of the South African population
and possibly in some respects in excess of them.
The story of medicine in South Africa begins with the very
first event in the history of the Colony, the landing of Jan van Riebeeck and
his party of soldiers and servants of the Dutch East India Company. It may be
said, indeed, that the story begins even prior to this event, for the declared
purpose of the station that the Company determined to establish in this part of
the world was the restoration to health of the scurvy-ridden crews in its ships
passing the Cape to and from the Indies. So that the first important
undertaking of the newly arrived Commander was the erection of a Fort, which
included a temporary hospital. A permanent hospital outside the Fort was opened
in 1656. It was not staffed by qualified physicians but by barber-surgeons, a
type of practitioner employed by the Company both at sea and on land to serve
the health of its servants. For reasons indicated in the following paragraph,
we may safely assume that there were no Jewish doctors amongst them.
BARBER-SURGEONS
The barber-surgeon of the 17th and 18th centuries bore
little resemblance either to the modern barber or the modern surgeon, and was
not a medical doctor. He was competent to curl and trim moustaches, to let
blood, to draw teeth, to amputate limbs and so on, but he was not permitted to
engage in what was styled "internal medicine. He ranked at sea below the
chief carpenter and above the boatswain. He was a licensed member of the
Barber-Surgeon's Guild and had served an apprenticeship in the household of a
Master Surgeon. Jan van Riebeeck himself had been such before he received his
appointment as Commander. Since admission to the guilds was barred to the Jews,
there were no Jewish barber-surgeons in practice in the early days of the
settlement. Nor is there evidence of any Jewish doctors amongst the very
limited number of qualified physicians who served the small Colony at the Cape
during the Company's tenure. There was, in fact, no freedom of worship under
the Dutch East India Company's rule (unlike that of the Dutch West India
Company, which encouraged Jewish colonisation). The few persons in the Cape
population during the 17th and 18th centuries known to have been of Jewish
family were all conforming Christians. Not one of them was engaged in the
practice of medicine. It is not until after the British had taken over the Cape
in 1806 that we find the first Jewish medical doctor in this country.
In 1807, a Government Proclamation established legislative
control for the first time over all professional medical practice at the Cape.
A Medical Committee was appointed to examine diplomas. It found the bulk of the
practitioners to be unqualified, and an abundance of quackery existing,
especially in the country places where the Committee commented on the
"shameful ignorance" of most of the so-called surgeons practising
medicine. The same year a Permanent Supreme Medical Committee was given full
powers and granted licences to practise to only four doctors of medicine. Nine
other practitioners were licensed as surgeons.
FIRST JEWISH DOCTOR
Dr. Siegfried Frankel arrived at the Cape from
Mecklenburg-Strelitz in 1808 and was granted a licence to practise in the same
year. His surgery was situated at No. 9 Roeland Street and in later years in
Markt Plein. In 1839, following a serious epidemic of measles, Cape Town was
divided into Wards with a Medical Practitioner and two Wardmasters in charge of
each, to succour the poor, to notify new cases and to enforce disinfection. Dr.
Frankel was appointed to Ward 5, which included Castle Street, Hout Street and
Shortmarket Street from the Heerengracht to the Buitengracht. He was official
Physician to the Orphan House and was one of the original subscribers to the founding
of the South African College, where his two sons were among the first students
enrolled.
Dr. Frankel was not only the first recorded medical
practitioner, but the first of the settlers in this country known to have professed
and practised the Jewish religion. He was, in fact, some thirty years after his
arrival, one of the founders of the Jewish Community of the Cape, being present
at the first gathering for Divine Service held at the house of Benjamin Norden
on the Day of Atonement 5602 A.M. (September 26, 1841), where he acted as
Reader for the N'ilah service, as he did each succeeding year during the next
five years.
He married, within a year or two of his arrival in the
Colony, a daughter of a Cape Dutch family, a union which, in view of his
obvious attachment to the Jewish religion, must no doubt be attributed to the
total absence at that period of any Jewish society. His son, Dietrich Heinrich,
followed his father's profession, being one of the very small number in his
time of Cape-born qualified doctors.
Dietrich distinguished himself at the newly established
South African College, gaining at the first annual examination - a public event
- the Dutch Latin prize, and by delivering to the public gathering at the Prize
Distribution an oration in Latin of some thirteen minutes duration, the text of
which was subsequently published in the South African Commercial Advertizer.
He enjoyed the confidence of his fellow students at the College, being one of
the six "Representatives of the Students of the South African College, the
embryo S.R.C. He studied medicine at Leyden and Leipzig and gained his M.D. at
Leipzig in 1837. Returning to Cape Town, he was licensed in October of the same
year to practise as physician, surgeon and accoucheur, and received the appointment
of District Surgeon at Colesberg in 1838. That village, founded in 1830, was
then the last outpost of civilisation, barely a village, and Dr. D. Frankel, in
compensation for the remoteness of his situation, was granted a salary of £150
a year in place of the usual £100. He practised in the Colesberg district for
six years and then moved to Worcester, where he became District Surgeon in
1850, succeeding Dr. W. H. G. Glaeser. He was a prominent figure in the affairs
of the village of Worcester until his death in 1861. He was succeeded at a
later date by Dr. Glaeser's son, Louis William Glaeser.
The medical affiliations of the family of Dr. Siegfried
Frankel are not without interest. His son Dietrich married into the Glaeser
family of physicians, father, son and grandson, that served the town of Worcester
for nearly 100 years. His daughter married Dr. John Laing, Resident Surgeon of
the Somerset Hospital in 1827, President for many years of the Colonial Medical
Society, and described at his death as one of the institutions of the Colony.
It is perhaps not entirely irrelevant to note here also that
Dr. Samuel Bailey, the original founder and director of the Somerset Hospital
in 1818, married a Jewish wife, Rebecca Manuel, widow of a prominent Jewish
Cape Town merchant, Isaac Manuel, who had somehow managed to combine during his
lifetime membership of the Tikvath Israel, the early Jewish community of 1841,
with that of St. George's Church.
While the total Jewish population of South Africa was still
but a few hundred, it is curious to find the district of Colesberg again an
area served by a Jewish doctor. "Doctor Kis,” as he was popularly called
by the surrounding farmers, was Dr. T. Braham Kisch, a brother-in-law of Aaron
de Pass, the Cape Town merchant. Settled in Colesberg as apothecary and general
storekeeper, Kisch was also practising in the neighbourhood as a medical man.
His precise qualifications are unknown, but they apparently satisfied the
Colonial Medical Committee, for in 1846 the Committee sanctioned his
appointment as temporary District Surgeon, an office which he continued to hold
for the next twenty years. He was officially styled "District
Surgeon" and "Acting District Surgeon" indiscriminately. (T. B.
Kisch, the Colesberg storekeeper to whom the famous O'Reilly diamond was
submitted and offered for sale in 1867, and who was subsequently one of the
discoverers of the Kimberley Mine, was not "Dr. Kis" but his son,
Tiberius Benjamin Kisch.)
IMMIGRANTS FROM GERMANY
The number of Jewish settlers in the Colony had been
substantially increased after 1840 by immigration from Germany, mainly from the
Duchy of Hessen-Cassel. The newcomers were for the most part connected in some
way with the mercantile empire of the Mosenthals, which extended over the
eastern area of the Cape and the southern Orange Free State districts. The
German Jewish immigrant families included Alsbergs, Baumanns, Goldmanns, Hanaus,
Hoffas Llienfelds, Sichels, Schoniands, Weinthals, Nathans, Hollanders and
others that are long since merged into the general population of South Africa.
They are described as "people of solid German-Jewish stock and much
culture," and they numbered amongst them many qualified medical men.
"As an entity, writes Burrows, the historian of Medicine in South Africa,
these German Jews brought stability as well as culture to the boundary of the
Colony, and the doctors amongst them constitute the advance guard of the Jewish
practitioners in South African medicine. In their generation the German medical
schools were probably the finest in the world. These German Jewish doctors, in
fact, furnished the first body of regularly qualified medical practitioners in
the Midlands and the southern Free State, districts and in and around
Graaff-Reinet, where Dr. Abraham Lilienfeld practised in 1852 and Dr. Moritz
Alsberg in 1864. Dr. Moritz Hoffa practised at Richmond in 1853. At Aliwal
North, Dr. J. H. Steinau began practice in 1859, and Dr. Hermann Kahn in 1864.
At Victoria West, Dr. Jacob Cohen was in practice in 1867 and Dr. August Hanau
in 1875. Dr. Jacob Hanau practised at Carnarvon in 1880.
The German Jewish
families continued to provide medical men for South Africa in the following
generation, many of their sons returning to Europe to qualify. Some of them
achieved fame in the annals of Medicine.
"Two sons of these families became internationally
famous in medicine, although neither returned to South Africa. Moritz Hoffa's
son, Albert, born at Richmond in 1859, became one of the great surgeons of the
German school, and he has been called the father of modern orthopaedics. After
qualifying at Freiburg in 1883, he rose steadily in the German academic world,
despite his Jewish British nationality, and in 1902 he succeeded to the
directorship of the Berlin Orthopaedic Clinic with the rank of Geheimer
Medizinalrat the highest then attainable by a doctor in Imperial Germany. He
was founder of the Zeitschrift fur orthopadische Chirurgie. Although he
never returned to South Africa, he maintained his interest and link with his
fatherland, speaking the Afrikaans of the day, it is said, and enthusiastically
supporting the Republican cause in the South African War. He died in 1908. The
other doctor was Edwin Goldmann (1862-1913), the son of Mosenthal's
Burghersdorp manager, R. N. Goldmann, whom the Times of London called 'the
natural successor to Professor Ehrlich.’ After qualifying at Freiburg, he
entered the field of experimental research, working as a histo-pathologist with
Weigert. By the age of twenty-nine years he was world-famous, and at thirty-two
a professor; repeated offers of high posts came to him from Cambridge
University and acclaim from all over the world. He chose to join Ehrlich in
experimental cancer research, however, and devoted the rest of his life to this
profound subject. Over fifty contributions to medical literature came from his
pen and he was responsible for a host of discoveries in the histo-patholo gical
Field. (Burrows: History of Medicine in South Africa).
PIONEER DENTISTS
In 1856, Dr. L. H. Hollander practised at Burghersdorp. He
went to Europe in 1865 and subsequently became Professor of Dental Surgery in
the University of Halle. At that time dental surgery as a branch of medicine
was yet in its infancy. It was not until late in the 19th century that
dentistry came to be recognised as a profession in England. In South Africa the
extraction of teeth was the traditional job of the barber-surgeon and the quack
at the village fair. Compulsory registration of dental surgeons came into force
in England as late as 1921, Ernest R. Moses, who came from Southampton before
1860, practised as a qualified dentist in Port Elizabeth, among the first in
South Africa, and introduced dental surgery under anaesthesia (an operation
first performed in the United States by Horace Wells in 1844 and first
practised in England in 1847.) Moses was appointed Honorary Dentist to the
Provincial Hospital at Richmond Hill in Port Elizabeth, opened in 1858. He
subsequently practised in Kimberley amongst the early diamond miners in 1872
and later in Bloemfontein. He played a leading role in both these towns in
founding the first Jewish congregations, becoming President of the Bloemfontein
congregation, and of the Kimberley congregation in 1875. He met his death in
1905, fatally mauled by a shark whilst bathing in Durban
MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
It was in Kimberley in 1888 that the first South African
branch of the British Medical Association was established, Dr. G. H. Hollander
becoming its first Honorary Secretary. The early gold mines likewise attracted
medical practitioners amongst whom Jewish doctors were represented. Dr. A.
Levine practised in Johannesburg when that city was in its infancy; and in
1890, a serious outbreak of enteric fever visiting the town, he found himself
in charge of a temporary hospital in President Street, set up to cope with the
visitation.
Among the earliest qualified doctors to practise in the
Transvaal was the converted Jew, Frans Lion Cachet (Levi Zegel). Son of a
Jewish family in Amsterdam, he adopted Christianity and trained for the Church
at the Scots seminary in that city. He came to Cape Town in 1858 as missionary
to the Moslems. With the proverbial zeal of the converted, he vainly tried his
hand also on the Jews of Cape Town, to find his efforts stoutly opposed by the
Rev. Joel Rabinowitz After spending some years in Ladysmith, Natal, as minister
of the new congregation there, he settled in 1866 in Utrecht, the first Dutch
Reformed minister in the Transvaal. He was licensed as a physician and surgeon
and combined a busy medical practice with that of dominee. His life as a
medical doctor in the Transvaal is described in his book, Vyftien Jaar in
Zuid-Afrika. He returned to Holland in 1873.
Dr. E. P. Baumann, of Graaff-Reinet, was an early
practitioner in Johannesburg. He had been trained in the Medical School of Edinburgh
University when increasing numbers of young South Africans were being sent to
universities overseas to qualify for medical and other degrees. By the early
1890s Edinburgh had for some reason unknown become a favourite choice, and in
1892 a South African Students' Union was founded there, of which E. P. Baumann
was a member of the first committee. Another of the Jewish medical men
practising in Johannesburg before the end of the 19th century, worthy of note,
was Dr. D. Horwich. During the Anglo-Boer War he was Medical Adviser to the
Jewish Ambulance Corps, a body of sixty Jews formed by the Chevra Kadisha in
Johannesburg before the British occupation. They earned the thanks of the Boer
authorities and continued their ambulance work under the British military regime.
But whilst Johannesburg was still in Boer hands. Dr. Horwich made his escape to
Delagoa Bay and joined the British forces in Durban and served as a medical
officer. He joined the regular army in 1905. By the time World War II broke out
in 1939, he had retired, but he enrolled in the South African Defence Force and
was installed as Colonel in the SA. Medical Corps.
More than one Jewish medical man served under the Boers in
the Anglo-Boer War. Dr. Albert Tren, for instance, was superintendent of the
surgical department in the field hospital with the Boers at the siege of Ladysmith.
His ordinary practice was in the little town and the neighbourhood of Vryheid,
where he was District Surgeon, He is remembered as one of the founders of the
first Jewish congregation there. A minyan met at his house and organised itself
formally in 1892. Dr. Tren and his brother-in-law, I W. Baranov, were its first
wardens. At Fouriesburg, Dr. A. Zavadier was in practice when the Anglo-Boer
War broke out and became Medical Officer in charge of the hospital there.
Something of the charm of simplicity attaches to the medical appointment of
Alfred Baumann, of the Bloemfontein Jewish pioneer family of that name. At the
outbreak of the War he was overseas studying medicine. The President of the
Orange Free State sent a personal message to the young, still unfledged doctor,
asking him to return home to do duty as a medical officer in the camps. Doctors
were few. He responded to the call, returning to his studies after the War.
Amongst the first medical practitioners in the Orange Free State was also Dr.
S. G. Friedman.
In the Cape and Natal, in all the principal centres of
population, Jewish doctors were becoming established about the turn of the
century. In Oudtshoorn Dr. L. H. Jacobson, who practised there from about 1896,
was the town's Medical Officer of Health, and Dr. L. H. Lewin was amongst the
early Jewish medical practitioners there – an enthusiastic Zionist of the early
variety. Dr. I. Stusser, a son of one of Oudtshoorn's oldest Jewish settlers,
was amongst the first South Africans to gain the degree of F.R.C.S., London,
and was for many years District Surgeon.
The number of Jews practising medicine before the end of the
19th century cannot have been great, but it must be seen against the entire
medical profession in this country, which numbered in 1884 but a few hundreds.
Precise information concerning Jewish doctors of the period is lacking, and one
can only estimate it from scattered references in literature to individuals.
EAST EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS
The total Jewish population in 1880 barely exceeded 4,000,
and their contribution to the medical profession appears to have been at least
proportionate to their numbers. In the early years of the 1880s, Jewish
settlers in South Africa began to become more numerous. Events in Eastern
Europe set in motion Jewish emigration on a vast scale, mainly from the Russian
Empire. The broad stream of emigrants flowed West to the United States, to
Britain and to Canada. But a small portion of it sought these shores - small by
comparison, but sufficiently large to increase the Jewish population of South
Africa more than tenfold by 1910.
Like the French Protestant refugees of two centuries
earlier, fleeing from the intolerable oppression of a priest-ridden State,
these Jewish refugees fled from the crushing discrimination maintained against
them by Czar and Church to settle in a freer country. A very few of them were
professional men. Aaron Abelheim, M.D. (Kharkoff) for instance, who had studied
at the universities in Berlin, London and Paris, came to Johannesburg in 1894,
where he practised for many years. He was a leading figure amongst the Rand's
pioneer medical men and was early associated with the Johannesburg Hospital
where he was Obstetric Physician in the Queen Victoria Branch, and with the
establishment of the Medical School at the Witwatersrand University where he
held the position of Senior Lecturer in Midwifery.
But the new comers were for the most part poor in worldly
goods and ill-educated by Western standards. They sought a living in humble
occupations. But they brought with them the determination to endure and to
succeed, and, what is especially relevant to our subject, a deep traditional
love of learning and an almost exaggerated respect for the learned professions.
Thus it was by dint of perseverance, and often at great sacrifice, that many of
them were able to send their sons and daughters to college: and when it came to
their choice of a profession, what more natural than that many chose that in
which Jews have been conspicuous throughout history - the medical profession.
They were sent for training to the medical schools overseas:
to Edinburgh in particular, to Dublin, and some to continental universities. By
the end of the first decade of the 20th century, many of the young doctors
practising in South Africa were children of these settlers or of earlier
immigrants, some born in this country and others who had arrived as children.
They reinforced the number of Jewish doctors who had come from overseas already
equipped with a professional training, and by the time of the outbreak of the
First World War, there were Jewish medical men to take their places in the
medical corps of the South African and Allied forces. Dr. B. Cohen, a young
practitioner of Cape Town, became Captain, S.A.M.C., and lost his life in World
War 1: Major Herbert Leviseur, of Bloemfontein, who served with the Royal Navy
and in the last year of the war with the Royal Air Force Medical Service in
France, and his brother, Alfred Leviseur, both of whom survived World War I to
see service again with the Medical Corps in the field in North Africa in the
Second World War; Dr. L. P. Sanders, Major, S.A.M.C. also served in both World
Wars. Notable also was Dr. Mary Gordon, a surgeon in the R.A.M.C. in World War
I, who joined the South African Medical Corps in the Second World War and
continued to serve for a period after the War. She was the first woman Resident
Medical Officer at the Johannesburg General Hospital and woman lecturer at the
Medical School. In 1946 she worked in Palestine and as a medical officer with
the Jewish detainees in Cyprus, subsequently becoming Medical Officer at the
Immigrants Camp in Israel before returning to South Africa in 1958 to join the
staff of the Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg.
By 1939 the number of Jewish medical men in practice in this
country had increased to such an extent that when the Second World War broke
out, there were Jewish doctors in the medical corps of the South African forces
in relative abundance.
In 1912 the founding of the Medical School in the University
of Cape Town enabled students to do the early part of their training without
leaving the country, and Jewish students were not slow to take advantage of the
opportunity. They could not fully qualify without going overseas, but the local
courses were gradually extended until it was possible for a full medical degree
be acquired in to this country. A medical school was established at the
Witwatersrand University shortly after that at the Cape, and Natal and other
universities followed suit at a later date. In 1922 the first medical degrees
were conferred by a South African university, and the honour of being the first
South African medical graduates fell to two Jewish students: Dr. Louis Mirvish
and Dr. Jacob Benjamin Solomon. Dr. Mirvish practised in Cape Town until his
death in 1960. He had pursued further studies in Europe, in London and Vienna
and gained his M.R.C.P., London, in 1931. He was highly valued as a specialist
and was Senior Physician at the Groote Schuur Hospital. He was an active
promoter of social welfare schemes in the Jewish community of Cape Town and an
ardent supporter of cultural movements. Dr. Solomon went into general practice,
which he continues today in Durban
In the years that have elapsed since the first medical
degrees were conferred, there has been a vast expansion of the medical schools
in this country, and of the numbers of students attending them, to provide for
the ever-growing demand in the Republic for medical services. To these numbers
the Jewish contribution has not been insignificant, A well-worn joke,
attributed to a Cape Town Scottish professor at a time when the overwhelming
number of the teaching staff at the Medical School were Scots, was to refer to
that institution as "The Scottish mission to the Jews. It was, of course,
a hyperbole. A general idea of the proportion of Jewish medical students in the
immediate past may be gauged from a scrutiny of a medical register. In 1960 the
total number of South African qualified doctors practising at home or abroad
(but registered in South Africa) was 7,809. Of these approximately 23 per cent
were Jews. There is a greater proportion of Jews amongst the qualified and
registered specialists. Out of a total of 1,884 registered in South Africa in
1963, some 29 per cent were Jews. The Jewish specialists were distributed about
the principal objects of specialisation in much the same proportions as the
others. There were between 70 and 80 specialists in Medicine, about 50 in
Surgery, between 40 and 50 in Anaesthetics, in Obstetrics and Gynaecology 30 to
35, in Ophthalmology 20 to 25. The remainder were distributed over the
remaining branches of medicine: Psychiatry, Neurology. Paediatrics and so on,
making a total of approximately 557. (The precise classification of Jews and
non- Jews is not always possible.)
IN PUBLIC SERVICE
In the public service no less than in private practice
Jewish doctors have been, during the present century, relatively numerous both
in the State medical service and the Municipal service, and also as medical
officers in various capacities in the hospitals. Amongst Medical Officers of
Health today or in the recent past are Dr. Harry Nelson, ex-M.O.H.. Pretoria,
who has done distinguished research work: Dr. M. C. Friedman, ex-Deputy M.O.H.,
Johannesburg, now Director of Medical Services in Sydney: Dr. H. Peisach, ex-
M.OH., Kimberley. Dr S W Adler, M.OH., Benoni. Dr. H. Bernstein, M.O.H.,
Vereeniging: Dr. H. Bloomberg, ex-М.О.Н., Brakpan: Dr. I. Kossew, ex-M.O.H.,
Roodepoort-Maraisburg: Dr. M. Maister, M.O.H., Pietermaritzburg: Dr. H. F.
Schiller, M.O., State Health Department: Dr. D. B. Lewis, M.O. Pneumokoniosis
Bureau: Dr. H. S. Hurwitz, Asst. M.O.H. Johannesburg, ex-M.O.H., Krugersdorp;
Dr. J. M. Tobias, Senior T.B.M.O. for the Transvaal.
In the State Health Services, the T.B. and other Medical
Officers number at least a dozen Jewish medical men, and in most of the large
hospitals they figure frequently as medical officers of one sort or another.
Amongst them are: Dr. L. Frack, Medical Superintendent of Baragwanath Hospital
(retired recently): Dr. H. Moross, Superintendent Tara Hospital, Johannesburg:
Dr. W. Waks, ex-superintendent Pretoria Hospital, now Chief Medical Officer,
Iscor, Pretoria. Head of the Casualty Department in Groote Schuur Hospital is
Dr. Theodore Schrire, author of Emergencies, Casualty Organisation and
Treatment.
District Surgeons include Dr. I. Friedman, Senior District
Surgeon, Johannesburg, well known for his work in Medical Jurisprudence: and
the District Surgeon of East London, Dr. I. J. Miller. In the Harbour services
are Dr. N. Miller, Port Health Officer, Durban, and Dr. Japie H. L. Shapiro,
Resident Medical Officer, Table Bay Harbour.
To end this necessarily fragmentary sketch of Jewish doctors
in the public service, mention must be made of Dr. Henry Gluckman, a former
Minister of Public Health in the Smuts Government, whose contribution is a
distinguished one. A Member of Parliament during 20 years, he has been at
different periods Chairman of the National Health Services Commission, of the
Central Health Service and Hospital Co-ordinating Council, and of the National
Nutrition Council and a leading officer in many other public organisations. He
joined the Cabinet as Minister of Health and Housing in the latter years of the
Smuts Government and has to his credit the initiation of the concept of Health
Promotion as distinguished from the cure of disease. With this end in view he
was responsible for the establishment of the National War Memorial Health
Foundation of which he has been Chairman and Honorary Director. The Foundation
functions through a number of centres the objects of which are to ensure
adequate nutrition, opportunities for healthy recreation and certain
specialised social facilities such as nursery schools, handicraft clubs,
gymnastic classes and so on, according to the needs of different communities.
Although the project was not crowned by comprehensive legislation, numerous
social welfare organisations under various voluntary and public authorities
function today as its offspring. Dr. Gluckman served in the South African
Medical Corps in the two World Wars, with the rank of Colonel in the latter.
MEDICAL LITERATURE
In the field of medical literature, South African Jewish
doctors have played a significant part as contributors to medical journals at
home and overseas, and as authors of books on medical subjects. Their contributions
to journals on almost every aspect of medicine are far too numerous to specify,
running into many hundreds, but specially noteworthy as medical journalists are
Dr. H. A. Shapiro, editor of Medical Proceedings, of the Journal of
Forensic Medicine and of the South African Cancer Bulletin, and Dr.
George Sacks in London, on the editorial staff of The Lancet. Of the
numerous South African Jewish authors of medical books it is sufficient only to
list a small selection. Dr. Charles Berman: Primary Carcinoma of the Liver:
Prof. Michael Gelfand: The Sick African, and numerous works on medical
history. Dr. T. Gilman: Perspective in Human Malnutrition (jointly)
Prof. I. Gordoa and Dr. H. A. Shapiro Medical Jurisprudence. Prof. N.
Sapeika: Actions and Uses of Drugs: Prof. H. Zwarenstein Practical
Biochemistry for Medical Students. Dr. Wulf Sachs, who introduced
Psychoanalysis to South Africa, wrote a textbook on the subject which carried
the prefatory commendation of Prof. Sigmund Freud. Dr. Max Minde wrote a
popular book on Psychiatry, In Search of Happiness
MEDICAL RESEARCH
South African Jewish medical men and scientists have
contributed their quota, and more than their quota, perhaps, to the body of
medical research of international standing that has come from this country. It
is possible to quote only a few of the many examples that could be given. Most
notable, perhaps, is the work of Dr. Sidney Brenner, F.R.S., on the Genetic
Code, an important contribution to the understanding of the intricate
biochemical mechanism of heredity. In collaboration with two Nobel
prizewinners, his colleagues at the Institute of Molecular Biology, University
of Cambridge, Brenner has published universally acclaimed research work.
Studies in the reproductive processes of the South African Clawed Toad some
years ago, by Prof. H. Zwarenstein and Dr. H. A. Shapiro, resulted in their
discovery of the Xenopus test for human pregnancy, which remained the standard
test all over the world for some three decades, until its recent supersession
by a simpler chemical test. The inheritance of Haemophilia was investigated by
Dr. Clarence Mirsky. On Heart Disease, notable research work has been published
by Dr. Velva Schrire and by Dr. Moses Sussman, amongst others, and valuable
contributions to the study of Anaemia by Dr. Lionel Berk. Dr. Sidney Cohen,
Chemical Pathologist at Guys Hospital, London, has published important original
research work on the Actions of Drugs. Dr. Maurice Shapiro, Medical Director of
Blood Transfusion Services, has done researches on some aspects of Blood
Transfusion. Dr. Jack Penn's work on Plastic Surgery is internationally
recognised. He is, in fact, one of the pioneers of the art and science of
Plastic Surgery. Dr. David Ordman, of the S.A. Institute for Medical Research,
has done valuable work in the study of Asthma: important work is being done at
the same institute by the Oppenheimer Heart Research Unit, headed by Dr. Israel
Bersohn. Researches in physical anthropology, into the pre-history of Man, in
so far as they are dependent on the work of anatomists, constitute a branch of
medical research, a branch which has been enriched by the outstanding work of
Prof. Philip Tobias on Australopithecus and its allied form Homo
habilis, whilst Dr. Ronald Singer's studies of Saldanha Man have received
wide recognition.
Also in the study of the Primates, Sir Solly Zuckerman,
F.R.S., now Scientific Adviser to the British Government, did distinguished
research, begun before leaving South Africa and subsequently published in two
books. His later researches into the effect of concussion on apes indirectly
led to his becoming the first of the new military scientists, and his
contributions to the scientific side of Allied military operations in the
second World War were such that Professor J. D. Bernal writes of him that
"the final victory on the Western Front was very largely due to his
collaboration with the air force under Lord Tedder."
In the latter work he was associated with another South
African scientist, Dr. Cecil Gordon, whose researches contributing to medicine
covered several fields, including that of human heredity at the Galton
Laboratories and later at the University of Aberdeen.
The selection may be fittingly concluded with the "last
scene of all that ends this strange eventful history" old age. In Geriatrics
the principal researches in South Africa have been those of Dr. I. M. Hurwitz,
formerly Medical Superintendent of the Cape Jewish Aged Home. Dr. Hurwitz was
the chief promoter of that study in this country and was founder of the South
African Geriatrics Society. In Johannesburg too the Jewish contribution to that
branch of medicine is conspicuous. Dr. Rachel Getz, Medical Superintendent of
the Witwatersrand Jewish Aged Home, a pioneer institution, has done valuable
work: and associated with her in the medical care of the aged is Dr. B.
Bessarabia, her husband, both eminent geriatricians.
TEACHERS OF MEDICINE
There can be no more valuable contribution to medicine in
any country than that of teaching; and Jewish medical men in South Africa have
provided teachers in plenty in our medical schools and hospitals during the
present century. Apart from the numbers of teachers on the staffs of the universities,
the men and women specialists in their branch of medicine who are wholly or
partly engaged at the hospitals are often occupied also in teaching students.
Especially notable in the recent past as a medical teacher was Dr. Lou's
Mirvish, who was Senior Physician at the Groote Schuur Hospital. But Jewish medical
lecturers are too numerous to specify and it must suffice to mention some of
the distinguished medical men who occupy or have occupied a Chair at one or
other of the universities.
In the Medical School of the University of Cape Town, Frank
Forman, Professor of Medicine, and Professor H. Zwarenstein (Physiology), both
recently retired after a working life of teaching, can today number thousands
amongst the doctors in practice in South Africa and overseas who were students
under them and who would gratefully testify to the excellence of their
teaching. In the same Medical School, Professor N. Sapeika (Pharmacology)
continues a career of successful teaching. Amongst the medical teachers at
present or in recent years at the University of the Witwatersrand, noteworthy
are Professor Joseph Gilman (Physiology), now Director of the National
Institute of Health and Medical Research in Ghana: Professor J. Friedman
(Forensic Medicine): Professor M. H. Luntz (Ophthalmology): Professor Paul Levy
(Physiological Chemistry): Professor H. Stein (Chemical Pathology): Professor
J. M. Edelstein (Orthopaedic Surgery): Professor Jack Penn, M.B.E. (Plastic and
Oral Surgery); and Professor P. Tobias (Anatomy). The Dean of the Medical
School in the University of Natal is Professor Isidor Gordon (Pathology) and
the Professor of Physiology in the same university is Professor Theodore
Gilman.
Apart from medical men and scientists, Jews in South Africa
as elsewhere have been active in the promotion and founding and support of
hospitals. The Free Dispensary in Cape Town was founded with the support and
largely on the initiative of the Rev. Joel Rabinowitz. The first hospital in
Bloemfontein, St. George's Cottage Hospital, forerunner of the National
Hospital, was founded in 1875 by the Anglican Bishop Webb, with the active
support of Moritz Leviseur, who remained a member of the Hospital Board and was
its secretary and treasurer for many years. The Rev. A. P. Bender. throughout
the years of his long period of office in Cape Town, was active in the support,
and solicitous for the welfare of the hospitals and an assiduous member of the
Hospital Board. Jewish ministers in general in all the principal centres have
been, almost without exception, actively interested in the work of hospitals.
JEWISH BENEFACTIONS
In the material support of the cause of medicine, South
African Jews have been, one might almost say, conspicuous in their benefactions
to hospitals, medical schools, convalescent homes and all those institutions
that have for their object the care and cure of the sick. In Cape Town the
munificent gift of half a million pounds from Alfred and Otro Best and their
(non-Jewish) partner, Julius Wernher, made possible the building of the
University with its Medical School, including the Wernher-Beit Medical
Laboratories. The Lady Michaelis Orthopaedic Home was the gift of Max
Michaelis, and the Maitland Cottage Homes for Crippled Children of their
daughter. The Hyman Liberman bequest endowed beds in Groote Schuur Hospital,
benefited the Equipment Fund and provided substantial donations for the other
hospitals of the Peninsula. One wing of the Eaton Convalescent Home was donated
by Daniel de Pass in memory of Aaron de Pass. More recently Morris Mauerberger
bequeathed a large sum for medical bursaries and to help to establish a School
of Dentistry at the University with operating theatre and wards. Donations and
bequests from people of more moderate means have also been numerous.
In Johannesburg, Otto Beit bequeathed his mansion,
"Hohenheim," with 33 acres, for a convalescent home. Additional wards
in the General Hospital were built from a bequest by B. I. Barnato, and
substantial sums were bequeathed by numerous other Jewish donors. The Transvaal
Memorial Hospital for Children has a ward donated by Julius and Elizabeth
Berlein, and handsome donations and bequests came to it from Albus, Oppenheimers,
the Jewish women of Johannesburg and others, and cots were bequeathed by Isaac
Broude and Abe Atkins. Emile Nathan bequeathed the whole of his large estate
(about £100,000)
to the Johannesburg Hospital. Jewish donors have endowed fellowships, bursaries
and prizes for medical students and left substantial sums to the Deaf and Dumb
Association, the National Cancer Association and other organisations involving
medical effort. Within recent years the first Chair of Ophthalmology at the
Witwatersrand University was founded with the aid of a large donation from Sam
Cohen, who inspired also the Blindness Research Association which received
substantial gifts from J. Schlesinger, H. Oppenheimer, Weil and Aschheim and
others. The Heart Research Unit at the S.A. Institute for Medical Research
bears the name of Ernest Oppenheimer.
In Kimberley, East London and Pietermaritzburg the hospitals
have benefited by large bequests from Jewish donors, and in Port Elizabeth the
Mosenthal family heads a long list of Jewish donors to the hospitals.
Apart from the munificent gifts of the rich, Jews, in
contributions on a more modest scale from people of lesser means, have been no
less generous than their fellow citizens in the support of the noble cause of
medicine.
In view of the foregoing facts and observations, one may
reasonably assume that the all-round contribution by Jews to medicine in South
Africa has been a considerable and worthy one although, strange to say, the
latter description might have been denied in the 1930s when, under the impact
of propaganda from Germany, great power was brought to bear in this country to
reproach and vilify Jews, and to ascribe to their discredit, amongst many other
faults, the fact that so many of them were in the medical profession!
When Moses led the Children of Israel, he chose seventy
elders to judge the people: and the spirit of the Lord descended on them and
they prophesied. Eldad and Medad, not of the seventy, also prophesied, and
Joshua the son of Nun reported this scandalous thing, saying: "My lord,
Moses, forbid them!" and Moses replied "Would God all the Lord's
people were prophets.'
REFERENCES
Burrows: History of Medicine in South Africa. Files
of the South African Medical Journal. Papers in the Library of the S.A.
Jewish Board of Deputies. Medical Directories of South Africa 1960-1, 1963.
Herrman: History of the Jews in South Africa, Saron and Hotz: The
Jews of South Africa. South African Jews in World War II (S.A. Board
of Deputies). Personal communications from Dr. Hymie Gordon and other friendly
medical men.
