"How to Prevent and Fight Infectious Diseases?" – Healthcare Manual for the Jews of the Ghetto – Written by a ...

"How to Prevent and Fight Infectious Diseases?" – Healthcare Manual for the Jews of the Ghetto – Written by a Jewish Physician and Issued by the Jewish Social Self-Help Organization (ZSS) – Krakow, 1941
Jak zapobiegać chorobom zakaźnym i jak je zwalczać? [How to prevent and fight Infectious diseases?], by Dr. Stefania Silberberg. Krakow: Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna [ZSS – Jewish Social Self-Help organization], 1941. Polish.
Jewish medicine in the ghettoes is considered a one-time phenomenon in history – the establishment of a health system by persecuted victims under the threat of death. Immediately after the establishment of the first ghettos, Jewish physicians (whose percentage in the population was very high – approximately 40% of all Polish physicians on the eve of the war were Jewish) started setting up an extensive health system and before long established an efficient, disciplined infrastructure: hospitals, family healthcare centers, women's and children's medicine, social medicine, pharmacies, medical schools and even research labs.
Throughout the years of the ghettos' existence, right up to their destruction, most of the Jewish physicians continued working, providing their services to the inmates of the ghetto, even when the mortality rate of the physicians, who contracted contagious diseases, reached 20 percent.
This rare booklet provides important documentation of medical activity in the ghettos: a healthcare manual for the Jews of the ghetto, written by a Jewish physician in the Krakow ghetto. The manual, published by the JSS organization (JSS – J üdische Soziale Selbsthilfe, the only Jewish help organization given Nazi permission to operate in the Generalgouvernement area), is one of the only publications printed by Jews in the ghettos with permission (the German authorities forbade almost every Jewish publication in the area of occupied Poland). As early as June 1941, JSS representatives requested German authorities for special permission to print 50,000 copies, and after several months received a limited approval to print 10,000 copies to be distributed through the branches of the organization in the various ghettos (see enclosed material).
The manual begins with a short introduction on the subject of bacteria, epidemics and vaccines, followed by three chapters dedicated each to a different disease: Typhus fever (Tyfus plamisty), Typhoid (Tyfus Brzuszny) and Dysentery (Czerwonka) – three common diseases that killed thousands of the Jews in ghettos throughout the war.
The author, physician Stefania Silberberg, is mentioned in several listings on the "Yad Vashem" and the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum websites, and in a list of deceased from Krakow printed in the medical journal Przeglad Lekarski (issue no. 1, July 1945). The listings indicate that Stefania was born in 1898 in Krakow to parents named Hermann and Adela and was a bacteriologist by training. In 1942 she was presumably sent to her death at the Belzec or Treblinka extermination camp.
Rare booklet. Not in OCLC.
14 pp, approx. 23 cm. Good condition. A few stains and blemishes, mostly to cover. Rusty staples.