<h1>This article posted below has a remarkable resemblance to the discussions presented by non-asian posters here speaking for the asian discrimination and against abolishing the so-called affirmative action in admission (which in fact is a discrimination against asians). Just substitute the words “Jewish” by “Asian”, “medical schools” and “hospitals” by “college”, “religious -affiliation” by “ethnic-affiliation”, and “anti-semitic” by “anti-asian”, and first few paragraphs of the following article read quite well. </h1>
<p>[NY</a> Times Advertisement](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/health/26quot.html]NY”>When Jewish Doctors Faced Quotas, a Pose in Defiance - The New York Times)</p>
<p>"In a Time of Quotas, a Quiet Pose in Defiance
By BARRON H. LERNER
Published: May 25, 2009 </p>
<p>As a Jewish physician practicing medicine in 2009, I hardly ever pay attention to my religious affiliation. </p>
<p>But in the years before World War II, at my institution and at other medical schools, Judaism was very much on people’s minds. Informal quotas limited the numbers of Jewish medical students and physicians.</p>
<p>Within hospital walls, some non-Jewish physicians supported the quotas and others opposed them. An untold story from Columbia’s Neurological Institute demonstrates an ingenious attempt by one physician to thwart what he believed was an unjust policy. </p>
<p>A central reason that colleges and medical schools established quotas in the early 20th century was the immigration of millions of Eastern European Jews to New York and other cities. When children from these families pursued higher education, the percentage of Jewish applicants increased. </p>
<p>This competition from Jewish students promoted the emergence of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, Edward C. Halperin wrote in 2001 in The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Educators limited the number of Jews based on beliefs that they were too bookish, aggressive and greedy. Religious affiliation was deduced by studying students’ names, interviewing them and asking them directly on medical school applications. </p>
<p>“We limit the number of Jews admitted to each class to roughly the proportion of Jews in the population of the state,” the dean of Cornell University Medical College said in 1940, according to the journal article. At Yale Medical School, applications of Jewish students were marked with an “H” for “Hebrew.” </p>
<p>As a result, the number of Jewish students dropped. At the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, for example, the percentage of Jewish students fell to 6 percent from 47 percent between 1920 and 1940.</p>
<p>It is harder to document the exclusion of Jewish physicians, but this was occurring too. In “Time to Heal,” the medical historian Kenneth M. Ludmerer writes that quotas were even stricter for senior physician positions at university-affiliated hospitals. </p>
<p>Because hospitals put quotas into effect tacitly and rarely documented them, little has been written about how non-Jewish physicians responded to them. But in a new book, “The Legacy of Tracy J. Putnam and H. Houston Merritt,” Lewis P. Rowland, an emeritus professor of neurology at Columbia, provides insights into how such quotas worked in practice. </p>
<p>The quota system eventually began to break down, and Dr. Rowland suggests that one reason was the influx of refugee European Jewish physicians fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s. At Columbia, the department of neurology had quietly hired several of these doctors, many of whom were quite eminent. </p>
<p>One, for example, was Otto Marburg, a Viennese neurologist who emigrated from Austria in 1938 with his friend Sigmund Freud. </p>
<p>But how could the presence of these physicians be squared with the informal policies discouraging the hiring of Jews? At Columbia’s Neurological Institute in the 1940s, Dr. Rowland writes, a curious solution emerged: the neurology service was divided in two. The East service contained no Jewish physicians while the West service contained 5 to 10 European Jews.</p>
<p>The mastermind behind this compromise was Dr. Putnam, a neurologist, neurosurgeon and psychiatrist who was named head of the Neurological Institute in 1939. A Boston Brahmin, Dr. Putnam was the vice chairman of the National Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians. “It seems likely,” Dr. Rowland concludes, “that all of these European neurologists were appointed by Putnam.”</p>
<p>Dr. Putnam was forced to resign in 1947, ending his career at Columbia. Colleagues at the time suspected several reasons, including a lack of administrative skills, enemies on the staff and the conflicts that arose from having a neurosurgeon running a neurological institute. </p>
<p>But Dr. Rowland unearthed another explanation. A New York newspaper of the era, called PM, reported in 1947 that Dr. Putnam had been told to fire all of the “non-Aryan” neurologists, something he was unwilling to do.</p>
<p>Dr. Rowland corroborated this story when he discovered a 1961 letter written by Dr. Putnam to a fellow physician. Dr. Putnam reported that Charles Cooper, then head of Columbia’s affiliated hospital, Presbyterian, had told him in 1945 “that I should get rid of all the Jews in my department or resign.”</p>
<p>Although Dr. Putnam left, most of the Jewish neurologists stayed, under the leadership of Dr. Merritt. But Columbia did not have a Jewish physician as head of neurology until 1973, when Dr. Rowland was named to the position. He was only the third Jewish clinical chief at the institution.</p>
<p>Quotas for Jewish medical students and physicians disappeared fairly rapidly after World War II, partly in response to Nazi atrocities against the Jews. But Dr. Putnam’s quiet advocacy on behalf of Jewish physicians when such a stance was unpopular should not be forgotten.</p>
<p>Dr. Barron H. Lerner teaches medicine and public health at Columbia University Medical Center."</p>