A history of the Antisemitic 1934 Montreal Hospital Strike

Lilly Groszman; George Weisz

doi:10.36834/cmej.79539

Authors

Lilly Groszman McGill University
George Weisz McGill University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36834/cmej.79539

Abstract

On June 15^th, 1934, interns at Montreal’s Notre Dame Hospital initiated Canada’s first medical strike in protest of the appointment of Dr. Samuel Rabinovitch, a French-speaking Jewish graduate of Université de Montréal, as chief intern. By June 16^th, the strike had spread to 75 more interns from Hôpital de la Miséricorde, Sainte-Justine, Hôtel-Dieu, and St. Jean-de-Dieu. The strike was purely antisemitic, targeting the first Jewish physician appointed to a staff position at a Catholic hospital. By situating the strike within its social context, Rabinovitch’s story exemplifies medicine’s history of systemic racism and highlights the contradiction between these practices and the medical principle of “do no harm.” Our aim is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between Montreal’s medical history and antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century. We conclude that the strike reinforces the historical basis of promoting racial diversity and inclusion in medical education.

Author Biographies

Lilly Groszman, McGill University

Lilly Groszman (MD, CM candidate, Class of 2025) is a fourth-year medical student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She was awarded first prize in the 2021 Pam and Rolando Del Maestro Family William Osler Medical Student Essay Awards for her work on Dr. Samuel Rabinovitch.

George Weisz, McGill University

George Weisz received a PhD in History from Stony Brook University and in Sociology from the University of Paris 5 (Descartes). He has written four books, edited five others and published numerous historical articles on such varied subjects as mineral waters, national differences in gynecological practices, clinical practice guidelines, and medical quantification. He has been a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), the Université de Paris (Sorbonne), and INSERM (Paris)

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