Book Reviews Kenneth Collins, Be well! Jewish health institutions included a Jewish Refuge and welfare in Glasgow, 1860-1914, East (1897) accommodating new arrivals and Linton, Tuckwell Press, 2001, pp. xiv, 194, transmigrants; a Children's Fresh Air illus., £12.99, US$19.95 (paperback 1-86232- Fund (1908) offering country holidays; an 129-9). orphanage (1913); and the Glasgow Hebrew Benevolent Loan Society (1888), Between 1881 and 1914, nearly three which assisted workers to self-employment. million Jews left eastern Europe, of which Despite poverty and complaints by health about 15,000 settled in Glasgow, "second officials of insanitary habits, Glasgow's Jews city" of the British Empire. Their were continually shown to be better fed, integration was cushioned by a Jewish more abstemious, and to have an infant leadership which balanced community mortality rate lower by a third than the discipline with immigrant innovation-in host community. Jewish admissions to contrast to London which swallowed ten Glasgow's lunatic asylums were low (1.2 per times as many but doled out philanthropy cent between 1890 and 1914) despite a with a large measure of social control. This worldwide belief that Jews were predisposed is a well researched and descriptive rather to insanity. Jewish immigration to Britain than analytical history of the health, appears to have had minimal welfare, social conditions and medical epidemiological and demographic impact on aspirations of Glasgow's Jewish community, infectious diseases although tuberculosis written by their foremost historian, who is and trachoma became political issues. also a general practitioner and leader of the Glasgow played a leading role in the anti- city's Jewish community. TB crusade of the 1890s, largely because TB Most Jews settled south of the River was responsible for 13 per cent of deaths in Clyde, in the Gorbals, where much of Scotland. Jewish paupers with TB were Glasgow's worst housing doubled as "encouraged" to emigrate to the warmer residence/workspace. The institutions climates of Australia and New Zealand so facilitating early settlement were based that, by 1928, Glasgow Jews had a lower around Garnethill Synagogue, established incidence of the disease than their gentile in 1879 but successor to congregations neighbours. Trachoma, to which Jews were dating to 1823. Most welfare activities believed to be racially predisposed, included a medical dimension with strengthened the cause against Jewish agencies increasingly secularized as the immigration in the run-up to the Aliens Act community expanded. Self-reliance was (1905). In 1914, Glasgow became the only encouraged. Friendly societies became the British city to make trachoma a notifiable most widespread associations among disease because of its high incidence in city Jewish workers in Britain, and by 1908 schools, although only 14.4 per cent of only seventy-five Jews in Scotland were cases notified between 1914 and 1937 were receiving poor relief. As the first in patients born abroad. substantial non-Christian group to settle Kenneth Collins defines the goals of in Scotland, Jews became targets for Jewish immigrants as personal economic medical missionaries, perceived to be a stability followed by establishment of greater threat to the community's integrity conditions whereby their children could than they ever were in England. Jewish advance in the Scottish tradition of leaders mobilized to match facilities educational democracy. The medical offered by missions. By 1911, 1,500 profession was perceived as the road to admission lines to Glasgow's hospitals had social advancement. The role model was been secured, and a Jewish dispensary Asher Asher (1837-89), son of poor provided medical and dental care. Other immigrants who became the first native Jew 274 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.58, on 30 Sep 2021 at 22:09:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002572730005688X Book Reviews to graduate in medicine from Glasgow rapid burial, and debates on diet and University. Asher departed for London in circumcision. There is an interesting 1862 to become medical practitioner to the discussion on whether Jews were susceptible Jewish Board of Guardians and, in 1870, to particular diseases and conditions, was appointed the first secretary of the especially to tuberculosis, syphilis and newly formed United Synagogue. By 1914, mental illness. Efron draws a contrast about twenty Scottish Jews had graduated between general studies, by, for example, in medicine although only four were Emil Kraepelin, which were stigmatizing, practising in Glasgow, among whom was and case studies by Jewish psychiatrists Noah Morris who became Regius Professor which denied a racial aetiology of mental of Materia Medica at Glasgow University breakdown. While others have dealt with (1937). For most, however, the medical the anti-Semitic distortions concerning the degree was the passport out of the Jewish doctor, Efron provides a nuanced community. account of the self-image of the Jewish This book is a valuable resource for doctor and his views on the health of Jews. historians of ethnicity, social historians of The text is invariably fascinating, as on the medicine and anyone interested in differing approaches of historians of Jewish immigrant health and problems of medicine. acculturation-as relevant today as in early By the nineteenth century, Germany was twentieth-century Scotland. distinctive for its high proportion of Jewish hospitals, and Jewish medical associations Carole Reeves, Richmond, emerged. Efron gives us little on these Surrey developments, and there is little on public health, or on Social Democrat Jewish doctors and eugenicists. Medieval and 1920s Jewish women doctors are cursorily no It John M Efron, Medicine and the German mentioned, but in way analysed. Jews: a history, New Haven and London, would be interesting to have grounded the Yale University Press, 2001, pp. viii, 343, work in prosopographical analysis, as illus., £27.50 (hardback 0-300-08377-7). Jewish doctors encountered considerable career difficulties. Some statistics are given German Jews have played a notable role in the final chapter, 'Before the Storm'. in medicine since medieval times. John Efron makes interesting but sporadic Efron provides a fascinating reading of a comments on the situation in Austria (as on rich and varied discourse on medicine as Billroth's anti-Semitism), but here the practised in and out of the ghetto. The situation is seen as broadly following on discussions reveal a tension between from German developments. He also avoids religious and secular knowledge. An the standard literature on Jewish medical important episode is the impact of the scientists, and does not refer to the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment. pioneering cytologist Robert Remak, or to This era saw the first glimmers of the historical studies of Bruno Kisch and professional hostility to Jewish doctors, but David Nachmansohn on Jewish medical also the emergence of the modem Jewish pioneers. The Holocaust casts a shadow doctor, more interested in science than in across the whole development, although this ritual, while retaining allegiances to the complex and tragic era is merely alluded to Jewish community. Points of friction include rather than fully explored. The work is differences between science and ritual, as in based on impressively multilingual the opposition to the religious custom of scholarship, and there are only a few slips 275 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.58, on 30 Sep 2021 at 22:09:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002572730005688X.