Religious prejudice has produced some amazing medical procedures [View all]

[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