The exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Photo: provided.

JNS.org – Chicken soup is known as the “Jewish penicillin,” but there’s much more to the deep connection between the Jewish experience and healing, argues a new exhibit that launched in Maryland earlier this month and plans to expand nationwide.

“Medicine has been impacted through Jewish participation and Jewish identity has also been shaped by our association with medicine,” says Deborah Cardin, deputy director for programs and development at the Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM) in downtown Baltimore.

“Beyond Chicken Soup: Jews and Medicine in America” is the theme of the latest JMM exhibit. The display, which will likely travel to other Jewish and secular museums throughout the country beginning in 2017, is an immersive, explorative, and hands-on journey through the 20th-century experience of Jews and medicine. JMM has been working on the exhibit for nearly three years.

The featured attraction of the multi-room exhibit are the famous manuscripts of Baltimorean ophthalmologist Harry Friedenwald, which are on loan from the National Library of Israel and are making their first appearance in the United States since 1943. The manuscripts are displayed in a re-creation of Friedenwald’s study. Among the hand-written manuscripts is a July 1922 letter from Friedenwald to his son Jonas, also an ophthalmologist, describing the challenges Jewish students faced getting into medical schools due to early 20th-century quotas limiting the number of Jewish students that could be accepted. Harry describes a meeting he organized with fellow doctors to review Jewish admissions to John Hopkins University’s medical school. Harry wrote of the “inquisition” into the religious adherence of applicants, which was conducted by asking for statements from each applicant’s mother. Harry hoped to end the quotas.

The rest of the exhibit walks visitors through a medical school, a 1920’s medical office, a hospital, a nursing station, a pharmacy, and a fitness center. When visitors walk into the medical school in the exhibit, the first thing they encounter is a brick wall — “a metaphor for the challenges that Jewish students encountered,” says Cardin.

The medical office includes an authentic medical table and desk, as well as all the tools a doctor would have used at that time. The supplies — a full medical cabinet — were donated by the family of Dr. Morris Abramovitz (1879-1951). Abramovitz’s most popular and influential invention was the Combined Method Apparatus, which offered doctors the option of injecting more than one solution at a time in situations where combined medications were required. Images demonstrating its use are featured prominently in the photos displayed near the cabinet, and inside the cabinet is a package containing the apparatus, which was set to be mailed to Indiana.

An ambulance door with flashing lights welcomes visitors into the hospital, where discussions regarding the first Jewish hospitals takes place. Cardin explains that in the mid-19th century, ethnic and religious communities around the country were getting together and establishing hospitals to serve members of their own communities. Within the Jewish community, this was common for multiple reasons: taking care of the community’s own members, combating proselytization, and ensuring that Jewish doctors who faced discrimination could be properly employed.

In Baltimore, Sinai Hospital was founded as the Hebrew Hospital and Asylum in 1868. By 1920, however, it changed its name and began serving the greater community, not just Jews.

Pharmacist Dixie Leikach shared an oral history with the exhibit, talking about the role that the field played in her and her family’s life. She says she met husband Neil in pharmacy school; his father, Henry, was already a prominent Jewish pharmacist.

“People think Baltimore is small,” says Leikach. “When you add in ‘Jewish’ and ‘pharmacist,’ it gets tiny. Everyone went to school with each other and many of the Jewish pharmacists in Baltimore owned their own pharmacies. Most have since been sold to larger chain pharmacies.”

Sharp & Dohme Drug Pharmacy started in Baltimore and was later sold to the Merck Group. The Bromo-Seltzer clock tower is a famous Baltimore landmark that was built by Captain Isaac Emerson, a chemist and inventor of the headache remedy, as part of the company’s factory. Emerson was a wealthy and well-regarded Jewish Baltimorean.

Dr. Alan Kraut, a history professor at American University and the author of three books on Jews and medicine, describes the significance of the exhibit within the context of Jews’ quest to defy stereotypes.

“Jews have been important figures in medicine throughout the ages,” Kraut says. “Also, Jews had to refute charges that they were inherently diseased or physically inferior in other ways to gentiles. In the United States, becoming a physician was very prestigious and a path toward assimilation.”

Kraut says one of his favorite aspects of the exhibit is the section looking at how Jewish leaders sought to advocate exercise and good health habits within the Jewish community in order to “build better, more robust bodies in the US.”

Interactive screens allow visitors to register their opinions about important questions concerning modern-day health and healthcare. Participants are asked to answer questions such as the following:

—“How do you choose a doctor? Is the decision ever based on gender or cultural background?”

—“Who should pay for the health care of those who cannot afford it?”

—“Who should be getting genetic testing and what are the implications?”

Cardin says the museum has not yet decided how to harness the data it gleans from the responses, but that the information will be stored, organized, and later disseminated to inform Jewish decision-makers.

She adds, “With all the contemporary conversation around healthcare costs and ethical questions in medicine, this is a very timely exhibit.”