Building a Specialty: Immigrant Jewish Surgeons and the Institutions of American Plastic Surgery

Abstract

American plastic surgery acquired its professional society in 1931, organized principally by Jacques Maliniac of Warsaw, with Gustave Aufricht of Budapest among its founders, and its journal in 1946, established largely through the efforts of Aufricht. Both were Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York in 1923 after training under Jacques Joseph in Berlin. Drawing on the accounts of Aufricht, Robert Ivy, Frank McDowell, and Robert Goldwyn, the official Society history, the published histories of the neighboring institutions, and the historical literature on Jewish quotas in American medical education, this essay asks how professional marginality and an institutionally immature specialty together created an opportunity for immigrant surgeons to become institution builders. It does not claim that discrimination caused the founding of either institution. John Staige Davis, Ivy, and McDowell are given their place, and Goldwyn, a first-generation Jewish editor, forms the epilogue.