Medicine and the German Jews
Subtitle: A History
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: May 1, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780300083774
Subjects: European history (ie other than Britain & Ireland); History Of Medicine; History of specific racial & ethnic groups; Jewish studies; Modern period, c 1500 onwards; c 1000 CE to c 1500; c 500 CE to c 1000 CE; History Of Jews; Medical / Nursing; Medical; Germany; Europe - Germany; Jewish - General; Medical / History; History; Jewish physicians; Jews; Medicine
Description: "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.".

"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.

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.