[Persecuted and forgotten? The neurologists Kurt Goldstein and Friedrich Heinrich Lewy].

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 a decidedly holistic approach in medical care, research and teaching. He is therefore considered a co-founder of modern neuropsychology and neurorehabilitation. Goldstein came into the focus of the National Socialists as a Jew, socialist and adherent of psychotherapeutic methods. After a short 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 a neurological institute in Berlin with inpatient beds, he decided to leave Germany as early as 1933 and arrived after a stopover 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.
(© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature.)