The Jewish doctor

The Jewish Doctor: A Narrative History focuses on medical practitioners in the context of their time, their work, exploits and discoveries, and the relationships they shared with their patients and communities. During the ninth through eleventh centuries, Jewish doctors were esteemed translators and transmitters of classical Greek medicine. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, even as laws were passed restricting their capacity to practice, Jewish court physicians were sought after by monarchs and popes who valued their services. After the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, when Jews were increasingly granted civil rights and educational opportunities, they used the medical profession as a means of upward social mobility or of escape to physical and intellectual freedom. Contributions by Jewish scientists in this century are often taken for granted, though they have been exceptional. Despite the fact that the Jewish people make up less than 1 percent of the world's population, nearly one-quarter of Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology have been Jewish. Jewish physicians helped to make German medicine preeminent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were major contributors to the development of science in the United States in the modern era.