Paul Lazarus

Paul Lazarus (Czernowitz 1873-1957 Locarno). From 1901 Lazarus was a Registrar Physician in Vienna at the Medical Clinic of the Charité under Ernst von Leyden (1832 - 1910). He received his Habilitation in 1903 and a Titular Professorship in 1907. From 1921 onwards he worked as an Associate Professor and was later a Professor of Internal Medicine. From 1907 – 1910 Lazarus was employed at the Charité Institute for Cancer Research. After Leyden's death, Lazarus became head of Leyden’s private clinics in Tiergarten and Grunewald. From 1907 onwards he was simultaneously Chief Consultant at the St. Marien Hospital and as of 1930 Chief Consultant in the newly built St. Antonius Hospital.

He was a pioneer of modern radiooncology and is renowned for his research on the effectiveness of radium irradiation and also for his "Handbook of Radiation“ (1928-1931) in which he collected contributions from numerous leading radiation oncologists in Europe in a 2,100 page edition. His training courses at the Empress Frederick House in Berlin which related to this subject were extremely popular. He later left the Jewish community and subsequently converted to Catholicism. He was baptized already in 1896 and henceforth openly took on the role of a professing Catholic. He saw his hospital as a „temple of Caritas” which was open to community medicine approaches. In 1933 he was deemed a „non-Aryan“ and subsequently lost his teaching license and in 1936 his position as Chief Physician was revoked.

In 1937 with the support of the Bishop of Berlin he and his family managed to emigrate to Fribourg. However, in Switzerland he did not receive permission to practice and remained dependent on the generous support of friends and former patients.

(Text: Udo Schagen, 2013)