A doctor and a philosopher
“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.“
Marcus Herz
This man was called the “philosophical physician“ and he knew and befriended all the illustrious people of the enlightenment era at the end of the 18th century in and around Berlin: Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, the Brothers Humboldt, Karl Philipp Moritz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing – to name just a few.
In the year 1782, he became the director of the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, having already worked as a doctor in Berlin – both inside and outside the hospital – for several years.
Beyond his work as a physician, he was always eager to study and discuss scientific discoveries, controversies, and philosophy, and he and his wife Henriette founded the first and most notorious literary parlor of Berlin – hosting besides some of those already named, and among many more, also early Romantics like Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel – who met his future wife in the parlor – , Clemens of Brentano and his wife Sophie Mereau-Brentano, Jean Paul, and Ludwig Börne.
„In diesen Kreis war nach und nach … alles hineingezogen, was irgend Bedeutendes von Jünglingen und jungen Männern Berlin bewohnte oder auch nur besuchte.“
Henriette Herz, wife of Marcus Herz
“Little by little everyone, who was living in Berlin or visiting as a somewhat eminent youngling or young man, was drawn into this circle.“ (my own translation)
In the eyes of Marcus Herz, the city of Berlin in his days was
“the main residence of wisdom, of sound common sense, of good taste and tolerance and the highest level of culture.“
Marcus Herz, quotation from Michael Nevins, Jewish Medicine. What It Is and Why It Matters, iUniverse, p. 12
His father was a poor Torah scribe of the Jewish congregation of Berlin. With the help of donors, Marcus Herz was able to study philosophy and medicine at the University in Königsberg – as a student of Kant – after cancelling an apprenticeship as a merchant.
Herz returned to Berlin in the year 1774 and started to practice medicine – walking through Berlin on foot to visit his patients in their homes. In 1779 he married Henriette de Lemos, the daughter of the director of the Jewish Hospital, Benjamin de Lemos, a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors had once fled from the inquisition in Portugal.
Henriette was much younger than him, and lived 44 years as a widow after her husband‘s death in 1803, when he had died of a pulmonary disease. She converted to the Protestant faith in the year 1817, getting baptized, which is why her gravesite is found on the cemetery of the Jerusalem Church – a church that was built in the 15th century by a citizen of Berlin in memory of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, but had become the chapel of both Lutherans and Calvinists in the Friedrichstadt quarter of Berlin.
Light and shadow
When Marcus Herz became the director of the Jewish Hospital, it was only a few decades old and just a couple of decades younger than the oldest permanently running hospital of Berlin, the Charité. In 1756 it had been founded by the Jewish congregation of Berlin as the “Jewish sick bay“ for the medical care-giving of poor and destitute people.
In 1861 the Jewish Hospital – the “hekdesch“ (Yiddish for “hospital“) – moved to Auguststraße, not far from the New Synagogue in Oranienburgerstraße. The new building offered the most modern and advanced hospital equipment available in all of Berlin: with water toilets, bath rooms, kitchen, examination rooms and doctor‘s offices on every floor. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, the third and final site of the hospital was opened in the Wedding district.
Two very famous doctors of the Jewish Hospital from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century period are the surgeon James Israel (1848-1926) and the internist Hermann Strauß (1868-1944). The former made significant contributions to urologic and renal surgery, and the latter was an expert for gastrointestinal diseases and diabetology. James Israel was a native of Berlin, while Hermann Strauß was the son of a merchant from Heilbronn, having studied at the universities of Würzburg and Berlin. Hermann Strauß, who invented the so-called “Strauß canula“ for puncturing veins, was deported to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in 1942, where he and his wife Elsa died in 1944 and 1945.
During the years of the Nazi regime, the Jewish Hospital was still open, but according to the laws of the regime Jewish doctors could treat Jewish patients only. In 1938 the Gestapo opened a police ward in the hospital, which later, on the hand, became a detention camp where the doctors had to examine the patients‘ “transportability“, before they were sent to the concentration and extermination camps, and, on the other hand, developed into some kind of underground ghetto, where about 800 to 1000 people hid themselves in the basement vaults of the building and survived the holocaust and the war. Obviously these hidden refugees must have had some sort of help from outside – people providing them with basic necessities like food.
At the time, Doctor Walter Lustig was the director of the Jewish Hospital – a very ambivalent character. Lustig was born Jewish, but had converted to Protestantism as a young man. In the years 1929 to 1933 he was in charge of the medical department of the police of Berlin. When the Nazis took over, he was deposed from this position, losing his license to practice medicine in 1938. After 1936 he worked for some years for the Jewish community of Berlin, before he was made the director of the Jewish Hospital in 1942. In his function, Lustig had to select people for deportation and set up lists. Both medical workers and patients of the hospital were deported. At the same time, Lustig succesfully circumvented the hospital being completely shut down by the Nazis and accomplished retraction from deportation for some people. After the end of the war, Lustig remained as the director of the hospital for a couple of months, before the Soviet regime put him on trial, which led to his execution.
Despite it all, the Jewish Hospital was never closed for not even one day throughout its 264 years of history. In May 1945, the hospital’s first post-war baby was born: a girl.