Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the American Tuberculosis Movement (review)

Writing to his family from Minsk in the midst of the Polish-Soviet War in May 1920, Dr. Charles David Spivak remarked that he was “lionized” everywhere and “What makes me great . . . is because I am coauthor with Yehoash of a Yiddish dictionary. The dictionary is known wherever I come” (141). Interestingly, Yiddish plays a rather peripheral role in Abrams’s otherwise compelling study of the life of an extraordinary individual. Abrams skillfully leads the reader through the main milestones in Spivak’s life, and the book’s chapters proceed both chronologically and thematically. This biography straddles diverse fields such as medical history, American Jewish history, and ethnicity and immigration in the Progressive Era. Abrams takes the eastern European Jewish immigrant story from the Lower East Side and the East Coast and places it in the context of the American West, a region that played a central role in the American tuberculosis movement. Following scholars like Mitchell Hart, Alan Kraut, and Judith Walzer Leavitt, Abrams demonstrates the significance of health care, disease, and medical concepts in shaping patterns of immigration, acculturation, and nativism.

Born Chaim Dovid Spivakofsky in 1861 to Orthodox parents in the city of Kremenchug (in today’s Ukraine), the young Spivak received a traditional Jewish education before continuing to a Russian gymnasium. Spivak belonged to a small number of young Jews from the Pale of Settlement who adopted socialist ideology before their arrival in the United States. Influenced by Russian populist ideas and the “back-tothe-soil” vision, Spivak was a cofounder of one of the “Am Oylem” (Eternal People) groups, which organized following the 1881 outbreak of pogroms in Russia in order to establish Jewish farming colonies in America. Like many other “Am Oylem” members, Spivak stayed in New York City upon arrival in 1882, where he became an industrial worker. In 1886 Spivak settled in Philadelphia, where he received his medical degree in 1890, specializing in gastroenterology.

As Spivak’s wife, Jennie, seemed to develop early signs of tuberculosis, the couple and their two children left Philadelphia in 1896 for the dry and sunny climate of Denver, Colorado. By that time the Mile High City had already earned a national reputation as the “world’s sanatorium,” offering perhaps the best chance for curing the much-feared consumption (57). Over the next thirty years, until his untimely death in 1927, the energetic physician would reach the pinnacle of his career in Denver. Apart from serving as a professor of anatomy and the chair of gastroenterology at the University of Denver’s Department of Medicine, Spivak emerged as a central figure in the Progressive Era’s crusade against tuberculosis. Together with other eastern European Jewish immigrants, in 1904 Spivak cofounded Denver’s Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS) sanatorium, one of the largest and most successful of its kind in the country. In its fifty year existence, the JCRS treated over 10,000 patients, most of whom were Jewish immigrants (at least until the 1930s).

Furthermore, true to his radical and humanistic ideology, Spivak insisted that the JCRS would accept patients free of charge and in all stages of the disease. Most sanatoriums at the time admitted only patients with incipient tuberculosis, who had the best chances to heal. It should be noted that Denver already had a Jewish sanatorium; in 1899, acculturated Jews founded the Denver National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives (NJH). But Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants felt that the NJH treated them condescendingly and displayed insensitivity to Jewish traditions, for instance by serving meat and dairy products together. The alienation of many immigrants from the NJH was one of the main factors in the formation of the JCRS.

Spivak’s range of activities seemed almost endless. While serving as the director of the JCRS, Spivak also created and edited a new local newspaper, The Denver Jewish News, treated private patients, gave public lectures, and published articles on various medical subjects, which...