Tag Archives: Nazi

Nazi doctors and medical eponyms

Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   “Special Children’s Ward” Vienna Am Spiegelgrund. Source. The tradition in medicine has been to name a pathological condition after the person who first described it in the medical literature. Thus we have Addison’s disease, Down’s syndrome, and several hundred others. The tendency now is to eliminate the possessive,1 giving Addison […]

Philip Roth’s Nemesis: a lesson for today

James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois, United States   Polio patient in a wheelchair. Images like this were used to encourage individuals to receive polio vaccinations, which were made available in April 1955. CDC Public Health Library. Source.  As we grapple with the impact of the current pandemic caused by the coronavirus, Covid–19, we may wish to […]

Call me Sylvester!

T. Killeen Cleveland, Ohio, United States   I could hear him as he rounded the corner from the lobby. He seemed to know almost everyone in the office; they cooed over him and he fawned at each and every one of them. My day was already busy with a full office schedule, a lecture to […]

The journey into the blue

Annette Tuffs Heidelberg, Germany   Alfred Doblin. Copyright S. Fischer Verlag “And when I came back – I did not return. You are never the same person you were, when you left.” Thus wrote Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) in 1946, in the newspaper Badische Zeitung in Freiburg,1 a few months after ending his forced absence of […]

Westerbork Hospital—a blessing in disguise

Annabelle S. Slingerland Leiden, the Netherlands   Westerbork Hospital from the outside This year Westerbork Hospital in the east of the Netherlands celebrates its seventieth anniversary, not of its birth but of its closure. Despite its well-deserved reputation for medical care, it was part of Polizeiliches Durchgangslager Westerbork, a Nazi concentration camp that held persons selected […]