Jewish Doctors Meet The Great Physician

It is well known that there is a disproportiionate number of Jewish doctors and that the profession of physician has been an important aspect of Jewish life. This fascinating study is a history of the Jewish doctor from ancient times to the present.

Part of the Jewish Encounter series Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance: a great physician who served a sultan, a dazzling Torah scholar, a community leader, a daring philosopher whose greatest work—The Guide for the Perplexed—attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge with faith in God. He was a Jew living in a Muslim world, a rationalist living in a time of superstition. Eight hundred years after his death, his notions about God, faith, the afterlife, and the Messiah still stir debate; his life as a physician still inspires; and the enigmas of his character still fascinate. Sherwin B. Nuland—best-selling author of How We Die—focuses his surgeon’s eye and writer’s pen on this greatest of rabbis, most intriguing of Jewish philosophers, and most honored of Jewish doctors. He gives us a portrait of Maimonides that makes his life, his times, and his thought accessible to the general reader as they have never been before.

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.

Although conventional wisdom holds that there's no such thing as "Jewish Medicine," Dr. Nevins disagrees, suggesting it's not so much what Jewish doctors have done as why. For example, in premodern times Jewish doctors viewed their work as a sacred calling in collaboration with God. Later, there often was a perception that Jewish doctors practiced differently because they were familiar with mystical and magical techniques. While many Jewish physicians through the ages have been inspired by such values as selflessness, compassion and profound respect for life itself, contemporary medicine seems to have lost its soul. To rectify this, Dr. Nevins proposes the Jewish cultural icon the "mensch" as a model of virtuous behavior for all doctors to emulate. This book is written for a general audience as well as for physicians. In it Dr. Nevins surveys Jewish medical history and, along the way, describes many remarkable "medical menschen."

From the Middle East B.C.E. to medieval Spain through the end of WWII, Frank Heynick traces the relationship between a people and a science in Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga. The ancient ritual of circumcision, Maimonides, the Bavarian Jacob Henle and Nobel-winner Otto Loewi make appearances in this sweeping history of literary, religious and professional links between Judaism and medical practice. Heynick, a scholar of medical history and linguistics, discusses the sale of mummified remains as a cure for disease, the ascendance of psychoanalysis and hundreds of other famous and obscure historical moments. -Publisher's Weekly.