Cover Kurt Huldschinsky, Benjamin Kuntz, Jewish culture and contemporary history
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Benjamin Kuntz

Kurt Huldschinsky

“Light instead of cod liver oil” Ultraviolet irradiation against rickets

Language: English
118 pages, softcover
27 illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-95565-535-8
Publication date: 2022
12.90 €

Jewish Miniatures Vol. 282A

Kurt Huldschinsky was born on November 24, 1883, in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia. During his first years as a pediatrician he worked among other things. at the Kaiserin-Auguste-Victoria-Haus in Berlin and at the University Children's Hospital in Vienna. After the First World War, he worked for Konrad Biesalski at the Oskar Helene Home in Berlin. 
Here he was the first to prove that irradiation with artificial UV light could cure the bone disease rickets in young children, which is usually caused by vitamin D deficiency. 
For this groundbreaking discovery and his further research on the prevention and therapy of rickets, Huldschinsky was honored in 1926 with the Otto Heubner Prize of the German Society for Pediatrics. He was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. As a Jew, he had to flee Germany from the National Socialists in 1933/34. Together with his wife and daughter, he emigrated to Egypt, where he died in Alexandria on October 31, 1940.


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Benjamin Kuntz

studierte Gesundheitswissenschaften an der Universität Bielefeld, wo er 2014 zum „Doctor of Public Health“ promoviert wurde. Seit 2011 arbeitet er am Robert Koch-Institut (RKI) in Berlin, seit 2023 als Leiter des Museums im RKI. Von 2020 bis 2022 war er zudem wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Geschichte der Medizin und Ethik in der Medizin an der Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, zuletzt als Leiter der Geschäftsstelle des „GeDenkOrt. Charité – Wissenschaft in Verantwortung“.