Mart J van Lieburg (ed.), Isidore Snapper's notes for memoirs 1889–1973: the autobiographical recollections of ‘the champion of bedside medicine’, Rotterdam, Erasmus, 2004, pp. 239, illus., €35.00 (paperback 90-5235-172-4).

Abstract

When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis at once ensured that Jewish physicians, medical scientists and teachers of medicine would be removed from their posts. The same removal of Jews took place in Austria following the Nazi occupation in 1938. In countries bordering Germany there was much discussion amongst Jewish medical men as to their course of action. In Holland, for example, there were those who thought that in the forthcoming war, which all foresaw, their country might be able to maintain the neutrality of 1914–18. Isidore Snapper, a distinguished Jewish research worker and professor of medicine in Amsterdam, thought differently. He was perceptive enough to predict that Jewish physicians in Holland might suffer the same fate as those in Germany and elsewhere and he prudently emigrated to the United States in 1938. Notes for memoirs was written in the two years that preceded Snapper's death in 1973 at the age of eighty-four. It is derived from a pile of papers written in English in his characteristic shorthand. It describes first his early education in Amsterdam, his pre-clinical education and his clinical years between 1908 and 1911. After clinical experience with A A Hijmans van den Bergh, the pioneer of bilirubin research and with Pel, of the Pel-Ebstein fever that occurs in Hodgkin's Disease, he became at the age of thirty the youngest professor appointed in Amsterdam. For the next twenty years he was recognized as a superb teacher and research worker who did particularly important work on bone disease. Moving to New York in 1938, he was encouraged by the Rockefeller Foundation to take a post as professor of medicine at the Peiping Union Medical College in China, where he stayed until the outbreak of war with Japan after Pearl Harbor. Here he continued his interest in bone disease, rickets being particularly common among his Chinese patients at that time. He was highly regarded by his Chinese colleagues who saw him as a true professor since he had a bald head, indicating that he read under a lamp every night. He also wore spectacles, which meant that he even read the small print of the articles. Finally his embonpoint showed that he had been invited to many consultations about rich patients. After Pearl Harbor he then had an interesting odyssey being exchanged for Japanese diplomats. After a long journey through South Africa and England, he arrived in the United States in 1942. There he worked first in the War Department in Washington and then in 1944 became a clinician, teacher and research worker in the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He then moved in 1952 to the Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Chicago, however, was not congenial to him and in 1953 he moved to the Beth-El Hospital in Brooklyn, a community hospital which he transformed into an academic institution before he retired in 1965. Snapper's notes include his own idiosyncratic views on medical education, as well as comments on medicine and medical life in the modern world. He is described as “the champion of bedside medicine”—there were however many others of his era who would deserve that title. Clearly the editor has had difficulties with Snapper's English, which cannot have been easy to transcribe. There are many errors. For example when Snapper describes his delight, after his Chinese episode, in rediscovering “Ladburys chocolate”, surely it was Cadburys. Nevertheless, this is an admirable autobiographical account of the career of a fascinating Dutchman who inspired all who benefited from his teaching. As the author states, it will be a vitally important source for the scientific biography of Snapper still to be written.