Hahnemann: The Adventurous Career of a Medical Rebel

MARTIN GUMPERT (November 13, 1897 - April 18, 1955) was a German-American physician and writer.

He was born in Berlin, Germany, into a bourgeois-liberal Jewish-German family. Stationed as a paramedic in Turkey during WWI, he studied medicine at the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg, specializing in dermatology. He went on to work at the Berlin Rudolf Virchow Hospital, first as a medical assistant, then as a resident specialist from 1927. He led the municipal outpatient clinic for venereal diseases from 1928 and opened the first counseling and treatment center of its kind in Germany. In addition to numerous publications in his medical field of expertise, Gumpert wrote literary works and biographies of famous researchers and doctors.

Forcibly excluded as a writer by the Nazis in 1935, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1936 and opened a dermatology practice in New York. His novel The Story of the Red Cross (Der Roman des Roten Kreuzes) was published in 1938 in both German and English to great acclaim and translated into five other languages. A series of narrative, autobiographical works recounting his exile experiences followed, whilst also continuing to make numerous contributions to U.S. scientific and medical magazines.

He worked as a medical reviewer for TIME magazine and taught as a professor at New York Medical College. In 1952 he became Head of the Geriatric Clinic at the Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York City. He died in 1955, aged 57.

CLAUD W. SYKES (1883-1964) was an English actor, author and translator. A close friend of the famous Irish novelist James Joyce, he acted in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s company and in 1918 founded The English Players as artistic director, with Joyce as business manager. He translated a number of German books into English, including M. E. Kähnert’s Jagdstaffel 356 (1935), Robert Knauss’ The War in the Air, 1936 (1936) and Lili Körber’s Life in a Soviet Factory (1933)