Monday Lesson From History

July 1st is the traditional first day of internship, the first year of post medical school training and humorously known as the unluckiest day to be a patient.  Naïve and green, new physicians in training are typically referred to as well intentioned but error prone, bumbling but idealistic. 

It seems appropriate this July 1st to recall how the idealism and energy of young doctors can sometimes have impact well beyond healing the sick.  One such example is of physicians actually creating an illness for their patients, which ironically would be the only chance both the suffering and their doctors had to survive. 

In 1943, at the height of World War II,  Rome was abandoned by the Italian army and overtaken by the Germans.  Under Nazi occupation, orders were quickly established in the city to arrest any Jews and prepare them for deportation to Auschwitz.  Across from the Jewish ghetto in downtown Rome stood the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, a structure dating back to the 16th century and run by the Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God.  When the ghetto was raided by the Nazis in October 1943, Jewish refugees were given shelter in the hospital.  Their fate uncertain as the German roundup of Jews continued, it was a group of young physicians who devised a plan to protect those in hiding from capture.  This was the origin of the fictitious disease, Syndrome K.

Syndrome K originally was the label used by the doctors and staff to distinguish the Jewish ‘patients’ from the actual sick in the hospital.  The fictitious disease was named after the German commander in charge of the Roman occupation, Albert Kesserling.  While this system allowed for all in the hospital to know which patients were refugees, it would take more ingenuity to protect them from the inevitable Nazi sweeps looking for Jews in hiding.  So the physicians created an isolation unit for Syndrome K patients, describing the illness to the Germans as highly contagious.  As tuberculosis was prevalent in Europe in the early twentieth century, the physicians coached the Syndrome K patients, some of them children, to violently cough whenever the German soldiers were present.  Vittorio Sacerdoti, a Jewish physician working at the hospital under an assumed name said “The Nazis thought (Syndrome K) was cancer or tuberculosis, and they fled like rabbits.”

Through the actions of hospital staff and led by young, compassionate physicians several hundred Jews were believed to be saved by the ‘disease’ Syndrome K. In 2016 the bravery of those at Fatebenefratelli Hospital was honored as it was designated a “House of Life” by the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.