About the lecture:
Saul Jarcho, M.D. (1906-2000) was a respected internist and medical historian. In 1959 he weighed the historical evidence regarding an alleged antisemitic quota to limit the admission of American and Canadian Jews to medical schools in the first half of the 20th century. He concluded “it must be admitted that the evidence of discriminatory admission practice by medical schools [directed against Jews] is not of the precision or concreteness which the historian requires”. This lecture will demonstrate that Dr. Jarcho was wrong. Dr. Halperin will present the evidence for the existence of an antisemitic medical school admissions quota. In an era where approximately 60% of the medical school applicants were Jews, the quota capped Jewish enrollment at 5% to 20%. Dr. Halperin will describe dramatic episodes such as the 1927 assault on the Jewish interns of Kings County Hospital and the medical interns’ strike in Montreal in 1934 in support of excluding a Jewish doctor from the new interns’ class. After explaining how and why the quota ended in the decades after World War II, he will consider themes of importance today such as the relevance of the history of the Jewish medical school quota to the White Supremacist Movement, controversies regarding immigration, the debate over affirmative action in higher education, and the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decisions which invoked the antisemitic quota and where supporters of the lawsuit referred to “Asian Americans as the new Jews”.
About the presenter:
Edward C. Halperin received a BS in Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, MD from the Yale University School of Medicine, and a MA from The Graduate School of Duke University. His work regarding the history of medicine has focused on the history of racial, religious, and gender discrimination in medical education. His history of medicine publications have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Academic Medicine, Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, JAMA, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. He was an internal medicine intern at Stanford University Medical Center and a resident in radiation oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Halperin held an endowed professorship and was chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Duke, vice dean of Duke Medical School, dean of the School of Medicine and an endowed professor at the University of Louisville, and is now Chancellor and CEO of New York Medical College; professor of radiation oncology, pediatrics, and history, and holds an endowed chair in biomedical ethics after the Holocaust.
New York Medical College, founded in 1860, is a health sciences university with schools of medicine, dentistry, podiatry, graduate studies, and health professions. Dr. Halperin is the senior editor of Principles and Practice of Radiation Oncology, now in its 8th edition; an editor of Pediatric Radiation Oncology, now in its 6th edition, and 245 articles in the peer-reviewed literature.