Persecuted and forgotten? The neurologists Kurt Goldstein and Friedrich Heinrich Lewy

Abstract

This paper commemorates the careers and the scientific influence of the clinical neurologists Kurt Goldstein and Friedrich Heinrich Lewy including their forced migration in the mid-1930s. Goldstein (1878-1965) set up independent neurological departments in Frankfurt/Main and Berlin, adopting adecidedly holistic approach in medical care, research and teaching. He is therefore considered aco-founder of modern neuropsychology and neurorehabilitation. Goldstein came into the focus of the National Socialists as aJew, socialist and adherent of psychotherapeutic methods. After ashort incarceration he fled via Switzerland and Holland to the USA. Lewy (1885-1970) for his part specialized in neuropathological examinations and in 1912 quickly discovered the inclusion bodies in the cytoplasm of nerve cells named after him. As head of aneurological institute in Berlin with inpatient beds, he decided to leave Germany as early as 1933 and arrived after astopover in England in the United States one year later. The biographies of the two highly innovative neurologists illustrate that career opportunities for doctors of Jewish descent were already clearly limited during the Weimar Republic and that they had to face anti-Semitic tendencies even after their arrival in the USA.