Abraham Jacobi and German Medical Radicalism in Antebellum New York

In early November 1853, the twenty-one-year-old German refugee physician Abraham Jacobi arrived in New York, bearing letters of introduction from his friend Karl Marx. America, that “longed for republican paradise,” offered him safety, democracy, and the hope of a new life after the failures of the 1848 revolutions in Germany. ¹ To the new immigrant, the thriving metropolis of New York symbolized the potential and freedoms of the New World. But the city he encountered was one troubled by nascent industrialization, large-scale immigration, and a growing sense of estrangement from the values of the early Republic.

Wave after wave of German and Irish immigrants had washed into the narrow streets and tenements of southern Manhattan since the 1840s, ballooning the population to some 600,000 persons. To the Yankee gentry, the alien cultural habits of the immigrants, the growing class-consciousness of the immigrant workers, the vile miasmas of the tenement slums, and the immorality of the saloons and brothels seemed to epitomize the danger that city life posed to the stability of the American Republic. Rampant disease appeared to be the wages of this urban sin, and a reform of city housing and sanitation was repeatedly demanded by sanitary and moral reformers from the 1840s. By the late 1850s, Whig reformers had succeeded in imposing fiscal and police reforms on the Democrat-controlled city, but vested commercial interests, the patronage politics of the Tammany Hall-dominated city administration, and the paralyzing political polarization of the coming of the Civil War served to block moves for sanitary reform in the city. ²

However, in the growing German community of the lower city known as “Kleindeutschland” (Little Germany) or “Dutch-Town,” a previously unknown movement for medical reform was established by immigrant radical German physicians led by Abraham Jacobi, Ernst Krackowizer, and Ernst Schilling. Against the backdrop of city politics, the emerging labor movement, and growing sectarian conflict over slavery, these immigrants sought to introduce the ideals of the German medical reform movement of 1848 into America. Chief among their aims was the democratic and scientific reform of American medical structure and practice. But an important—and, with hindsight, more lasting—element in this reform program was the introduction of the study of the pathology and therapeutics of infancy, an important chapter in the formation of American pediatrics.

This chapter in the history of medical reform in America has until now been lost in the Gothic script of the old German-language press, in the Americanization of German-American culture after the First World War, and in the discarded socialist youth of latterly establishment physicians such as Abraham Jacobi. It has also been lost in the neglect of ethnic and labor history that has characterized historical understandings of medicine in America. Immigration is commonly accepted to have been one of the motors of American history, and the last two decades have seen enormous renewed interest in the history of ethnic groups in America. ³ But until recently, immigrant and ethnic physicians, patients, and health experiences have generated little interest among historians of medicine. It has been estimated that up to a third of New York’s physicians in the 1850s were German; however, no studies of German physicians or health care have been undertaken. ⁴

Similarly, labor and radical history have rarely impinged upon the history of medicine in America, despite the importance of radical and working-class movements within the immigrant communities. ⁵ But immigrant physicians—in their practices in the tenements of New York City, in their care of large portions of the American population, in their use of European science and medical practices, and in their assimilation into (or rejection of) mainstream American culture—are vitally important to our understanding of the development of American medical science, practice, and social relations.

Jacobi’s Radical Background

Abraham Jacobi (1830–1919) is well known to historians and physicians as the founder of American pediatrics, and one of the most influential American physicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Politically, he has been understood as a...