Doctor Curmudgeon® The Fake Epidemic, The Doctor and the Nazis
By Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D. FAAP Doctor Eisman is in Family Practice in Aventura, Florida with her partner, Dr. Eugene Eisman, an internist/cardiologist
The year was 1939.
The month was September.
Poland had been invaded by the army of Nazi Germany.
World War II had begun.
In Warsaw, just before the start of the war, a young man, Eugene Lazowski received his degree as a medical doctor at Josef Pilsudski University.
With the invasion of his homeland and his new degree in hand, Doctor Lazowski quickly became a Second Lieutenant in the Polish Army.
Under German occupation, he was unable to elude capture by the Nazis for long and was soon imprisoned in a POW camp.
However, he quickly found a way to escape.
The young physician climbed over a wall. He discovered an old horse cart and stealthily rode it back to his home.
After his escape, he joined the Polish Red Cross. Jews in the ghetto were not allowed medical care but Dr. Lazowski came up with a way to treat them. If someone was sick, a rag was tied to the fence and the doctor would steal into the ghetto under the cover of the darkness of night.
Dr. Stanislaw Matulewicz was a close friend from their days in medical school. .Equally horrified by what was happening to their beloved homeland; they conceived a plan to save their countrymen.
Lazowski said that Polish physicians were “confronted with a special task- not only to prevent disease and treat sick people, but also to defend their lives and those of their countrymen.”
Typhus is a miserable disease with a high mortality rate. It could spread quickly through an army when, soldiers were crowded together with poor hygiene and a lack of adequate sanitation.
Since there had been no epidemics in over two decades people did not have any immunity.
And so these ingenious physicians created a fake plague.
Jews who tested positive for Typhus were immediately shot and their houses set on fire. Non-Jewish Poles were quarantined.
Lazowski and Matulewicz found that they could inject healthy people with a specific strain of the bacteria without causing serious illness. These people would then test positive for Typhus.
They used a dead strain of typhus bacteria, Proteus OX19. If anyone complained of a fever, they got a shot of a special vaccine, dead Proteus Vulgaris….and their blood was sent to German labs….and diagnosed as Typhus!
The doctors saved many Poles with the Jewish citizens among them as entire villages were quarantined.
As Dr. Lazowski later said, “I was not able to fight with a gun or a sword, but I found a way to scare the Germans.”
And the brave doctor? What happened to him?
His story does have the kind of ending that makes me feel good. He emigrated to Chicago with his wife and daughter in 1959. Receiving an appointment at the University of Illinois in the Department of Pediatrics, he continued to practice medicine.
It was not until 1977 that he spoke openly about what he called his “private war.” He only discussed the medical particulars in a newsletter of the American Society for Microbiology.
Finally, in 1993, he published his memoir.
And it was appropriately named “The private War: Memoir of a doctor soldier.”
Dr. Curmudgeon suggests “Bitter Medicine”, Dr. Eugene Eisman’s story of his experiences–from the humorous to the intense—as a young army doctor serving in the Vietnam War.
Bitter Medicine by Eugene H. Eisman, M.D. –on Amazon
Doctor Curmudgeon® is Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D., a physician-satirist. This column originally appeared on SERMO, the leading global social network for doctors.
SERMO www.sermo.com
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