ABRAHAM JACOBI: PEDIATRIC PIONEER

Abstract

Abraham Jacobi, pioneer in American pediatrics, was one of the intellectual giants of the last century, a century which had a number of such figures in medicine. Europeans such as Virchow, Pasteur and Listen helped to bring Nineteenth Century medicine to a scientific renaissance. One of the few great medical minds who migrated to the United States in the Nineteenth Century was Abraham Jacobi. We were fortunate in this country to have Jacobi come to be with us. We might have had Virchow, except that the rhythm of history was not to permit it. Virchow had too secure a position by the time the German 1848 Revolution took place and as such was protected; Jacobi was not. Let us take a slice of time, say March 1848, and look at several geographic locations and examine what was happening. This is a little like The Bridge of San Luis Rey; a number of people in different places playing their rôles and eventually coming together. In this instance the characters converged for a happier gathering than the tragedy of San Luis Rey. Observe Geneva, N.Y., where the Geneva Medical Institute had only a year previously admitted the first woman medical student, Elizabeth Blackwell, who was to graduate the next year, 1849. She was in the middle of her medical school career in March, 1848. In that same March, in Berlin and in certain other German cities, the 1848 Revolution was raging. It had followed the intellectual tradition of the Eighteenth Century after the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The German Revolution unfortunately did not succeed, and this of course was bad for the people fighting in it. Abraham Jacobi, Rudolf Virchow and many other intellectuals were involved. The list of democratic activists included now-famous names such as Semmelweiss, Traube and Remak. Jacobi was a young student of 18 years at the University of Greifswald. Virchow was well established in his research and teaching career at the Charité Hospital in Berlin when the street fighting took place.