From refugees to medicine’s cutting edge

and maternity benefits. Dr David Eder, a socialist and Zionist, started the prototype of the school clinic in Deptford. Here an eye-witness recorded Eder’s “unfailing cheerfulness and ingenuity when eye-testing had to be done in a dark back-cupboard of a room, tonsils operated on when beds must be improvised on the spot, extra money collected here, there and everywhere”.

Through the columns of his journal, School Hygiene, he successfully campaigned for a national network of school clinics.

Incidentally, after the Great War, Dr Eder, at Chaim Weizmann’s instigation, joined the Zionist Commission in Palestine and inaugurated some of the first public health schemes in the country. In a similar vein, when Herbert Samuel became President of the Local Government Board in 1914, he forcefully presented the case for state aid for maternity centres and health visitors. Hence infant welfare centres increased from 650 in 1915 to 1,278 in 1918; at the same time, the number of health visitors employed by local authorities quadrupled.

The health insurance scheme, together with an anti-tuberculosis programme and supplemented by these networks of school clinics and infant welfare centres, laid the foundation of a rudimentary national health service by the start of the First World War.

Jews first started to enter British medical schools in large numbers during the First World War. Between the two wars, the number of Jewish doctors in London rose significantly from 100 to 800, a rate of increase matched in Leeds,