Impassioned Science: Emotions, the Holocaust, and Jewish Women’s Careers in Science and Medicine

During the Second World War and the Holocaust, Jewish women studied and worked as medical professionals and natural scientists in profoundly intense and unusual circumstances. The impact of their experiences is reflected in the emotions they express and recall in narratives and other sources, such as oral and written Holocaust testimonies, memoirs, letters, etc. As “vehicles of knowledge,”^[1] these emotions reconstruct histories not just of Holocaust experience but also of medical and scientific careers in the Aftermath, and the links between them. Through close analysis of the life stories of Jewish women who studied and/or worked in science and medicine during and after the war, I have observed that emotional continuities underpin some of these women’s narratives of their experiences during the Holocaust and in their subsequent careers. These continuities reflect to an extent how certain Holocaust experiences influenced the women’s career choices. I go further, however, and argue that they also demonstrate how the emotional impact and weight of the experiences were carried into the women’s professional lives and ethics. Far from dispassionate scientists, they put immense emotional energy into their work as medical researchers and physicians. This was not impassioned science for its own sake but was rather deeply enmeshed with Holocaust experience. Working with Icelandic historian Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon’s microhistorical method of making close analysis of emotions an integral part of reconstructing aspects of the past,^[2] I discuss several examples of the continuities I have uncovered in my research. Among other things, my findings provide new insight into how individual Holocaust experiences impacted science and medicine in small but important ways.