Religious prejudice has produced some amazing medical procedures

[rug]

By Lenore Skenazy
May 19, 2012

The middle-aged lady is running frantically down the beach, waving her arms at the lifeguard: "Help, help!" she cries. "My son the doctor is drowning!"

It's a joke, from maybe a generation ago, based on the idea that every Jewish mother wanted to rear a doctor son and would brag about it until the day she (or, apparently, even he) died — which, it turns out, is based on an even older obsession: Jews and medicine.

I grew up with two doctor uncles in my (Jewish) family, so I always knew that the religion and the profession went together like chicken and soup — at least in America in my lifetime. But a new exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York showed me just how far back the two are twined — back at least to medieval times. And what's remarkable is that Jews were drawn to medicine even as medicine was actively rejecting the Jews.

One item on display is the note from a university official who interviewed a Dartmouth grad applying to Columbia's medical school in 1933. The applicant, he wrote, was smart and funny and "probably Jewish — but no unpleasant evidence of it." That was in 1933, when quotas made sure that no more than 5 percent of the student body was Jewish.

http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120519/NEWS04/205190339

http://www.yumuseum.org/index.php?pg=3

[NOLALady]

1. Yeah, like

choose five Jews, two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks of any religion.

[rug]

2. More like,

"Certain fields were less open to them," said Yeshiva's guest curator, Josh Feinberg, "like surgery, for example." More open were the newer, less prestigious fields of dermatology, neurology, immunology, pathology, psychiatry and gynecology. And those are where Jews made their mark.

[madrchsod]

3. all my doctors are from pakistan or india

my nurse practicer is from the usa.

[laconicsax]

4. My grandfather was rejected from med school because they had already filled their "Jew quota."

[rug]

5. What did he do?

[laconicsax]

8. Applied and was accepted to a different school.

He used to talk about feeling remorse at the knowledge that his being accepted meant that someone else had to be turned away.

[rug]

9. That's consistent with this article.

One of the other effects of this kind of antisemitism was the creation of the Jewish hospital system.

"Between 1850 and 1955, Jewish communities in 24 American cities founded general acute-care hospitals. With names like “Jewish Hospital,” “Mount Sinai” and “Beth Israel,” these institutions were often the local Jewish community’s most visible and impressive charitable enterprise. These hospitals’ first task, of course, was to provide care and comfort to sick Jewish patients, especially immigrants and indigents. Their larger mission was to help make America a more hospitable place for Jews by combating anti-Jewish stereotypes and hostility, and providing enclaves from anti-Jewish discrimination."

http://forward.com/articles/13591/continuing-their-mission-jewish-hospitals-reinves-/

[dimbear]

6. I was sure this would be a circumcision thread. n/t

[kentauros]

7. How far did you have to circumscribe the board

to come to that conclusion?

[dimbear]

10. We ought to take our hats off to the countless souls who died prematurely because of

religious prejudices against medical knowledge. The remarkable idea that autopsy was a desecration made criminals out of doctors and set back medical knowledge by centuries.

Finally a few brave Scots Protestants stepped up with shovels and scalpels. It's an interesting story.