Winston Churchill, stated quote and the Jews, held up to universal hatred, where pillaged, maltreated, and finally expelled from the realm. Exception was made for certain physicians without whose skills purses of consequences might have lacked due attention.”

Jews have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine 26% of the time. They have been 31% of the recipients of the Lasker award in Basic Medical Research. They have been awarded the Gairdner Foundation award 25% of the time and the Wolf Prize in Medicine 42% of the time. They have received the Louisa Gross Horwitz prize 42% of the time and 33% of the recipients of the GM Cancer Research Foundation Sloan Prize.

It is estimated that Jews are among the creators of history’s greatest life-saving medical and scientific advances (estimated 2.8 billion lives saved).

“Hence may be seen that God had not left us; if one persecutes us, another receives a civilly and courteously and if this Prince treats us ill, and other treats as well; if one banishes us out of his country and another invites us with a thousand privileges and do we see those republics do flourish and much increase in trade who admit Israelites?” Manasseh ben Israel 1290 A.D.

But it was not further economic progress alone that the Jews are value. It was a host of skills, not the least was the expertise in the medical arts. Indeed court positions of the rulers of Europe were Jews or crypto Jews. Frederick the Third   of the Holy Roman Empire, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Elizabeth I of England, Louis XIV of France, Catherine Medici, and Catherine the Great of Russia, all at one time or another employed Jewish personal physicians. A Spanish philosopher and theologian who did not have any love for the Jews, Raymond Lully,said in the 13^th century “Jews are universally entrusted by the great with the care of their health. Nor is the church free of this abomination, for nearly every monastery has their Jewish physician. Pope Martin the fourth, Nicholas the fourth, Boniface the eighth, Alexander VI, Julius the second, Leo the 10^th, Clement the seventh, Paul the third, Gregory the 15^th, Urban the eighth, and Innocent 10 all had Jewish personal physicians!”

Even in the Islamic world Jews were noted for their expertise in medicine. The great Jewish philosopher and physician, Maimonides was the physician to Saladin and his son. Many Muslim townships had Jewish physicians. They were also translators and transmitters to the Muslim world of medical scholarship, and later would play a great role in transmitting to Europe the scholarship of Muslim physicians. In the Middle Ages the Jews who were only about 1% of the whole population, constituted half of its physicians. During the last of the great European Jewish expulsion the medical centers in Vienna and Berlin lost nearly half of their physicians and the majority of their medical school faculties. Many were doing biomedical research and fled to the United States and helped to its meteoric rise in biomedical research therefore accounting for some of the 40% of the US Nobel Prizes in medicine. One third of the combined membership of the Life Science Division of the US National Academy of Sciences and its affiliated Institute of Medicine are Jews.

Jews were involved in so many medical advances that I’ve only picked out a few of the many.

The invention of local anesthesia and a discovery of novocaine by Alfred Einhorn.

The discovery of the ABO and others human blood groups and the Rh group by Karl Landsteiner who won the Nobel Prize in 1930 and of course was responsible for safe blood transfusions.

The isolation and discovery of penicillin by Ernst Chain. He shared the Nobel Prize with Sir Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey. Chain recognized the potential of the nearly forgotten discovery of penicillin. He actually isolated the active substance of penicillin and worked out its molecular structure.

The discovery of Streptomycin by Waxman and Schatz with is the first treatment of tuberculosis. They won the Nobel Prize in 1952 for this work.

The work on cortisone and the chemical synthesis of cortisone was discovered by Rice Dean and Kendall who shared the 1950 Nobel Prize for this work.

The discovery of neurotransmitters led to a shared Nobel Prize with Sir Henry Dale, Sir Bernard Cate and Julius Axelrod 1970 for their work which led to many improvements in the treatment of neurological disease such as Prozac and Paxil.

They also in combination with Leon Greenberg, and David Lester are responsible for the pain reliever Tylenol.

The development of oral contraceptives by Gregory Pincus.

The development of the polio vaccine by Salk and Sabin. The resulting near eradication of polio is estimated to be preventative in over one half million