Henry E. Sigerist

Henry Ernest Sigerist ( born April 7, 1891 in Paris, † 17 March 1957 Pura, Ticino Canton, actually Henry Sigerist ) was a Swiss historian of medicine and medical theorists.

Biography

Sigerist was the son of a manufacturer from Schaffhausen. He studied at the University of Leipzig with Karl Sudhoff and his habilitation in 1922 at the University of Zurich for the History of Medicine. In 1925 he became a full professor of the Department of History of Medicine in Leipzig. From 1932 he was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Halle ( Saale). In 1932 he emigrated to the United States, where he taught as Henry E ( rnest ) Sigerist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and later at Yale University in New Haven ( Connecticut ).

In between, he visited the Soviet Union and published in 1937 a work on the Soviet health care system, which he described as the most advanced at that time system in the years 1935, 1936 and 1938. During his stay in 1938, he visited his friend, the Jewish physician and medical historian Richard Koch in Caucasian resort Jessentuki, in which the Koch family had emigrated in 1936. Sigerist supported the Koch family and was probably also involved in their emigration. Koch wrote at any rate in 1946 to his son that Sigerist, " has done in the hour of need so much for us ."

Writings

• Beginnings of medicine. From the primitive and archaic medicine to the Golden Age in Greece. Europa Verlag, Zurich 1963.
• Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union. New York 1937.
• Introduction to " Maurice Arthus ' Philosophy of Scientific Investigation ." In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 14 (1943 ), pp. 368-372.