Deciding to Stay: Dunera's 'Alien Doctors' in Australia

Abstract

From the late 1800s until World War Two, German and Austrian scientists and institutions were prominent in scientific research and advances in medicine. Among the eminent German or Austrian academics and scientists were Physiology and Medicine Nobel Prize laureates Paul Ehrlich (1908), Robert BArAny (1914), Otto Meyerhof (1922-shared), Otto Warburg (1931) and Otto Loewi (1936-shared). Important discoveries having a huge impact on medicine included X-rays, for which the German scientist Wilhelm ROntgen was awarded the 1901 prize for Physics. At the University of Vienna, Karl Landsteiner investigated human blood, resulting in his 1909 classification of blood types as A, B and O. For this and later work he received the 1930 prize for Physiolocy and Medicine. Amongst this list, ROntgen was the only scientist who was not Jewish, illustrating the prominence of Jews in science and medicine.