Trailblazer in the Field of Neonatology
Ingeborg Rapoport *1912 - 2017
Biography
The founder of neonatology, Ingeborg Rapoport, née Syllm, was born in 1912 in Kribi in the former German colony of Kamerun, which is present-day Cameroon. She grew up in Hamburg, where she studied medicine and passed the state examina-tion in 1937. However, as she was Jewish, she was denied a doctorate. She emi-grated to the United States in 1938. Her degree was not recognized, so she studied at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia for another two years before receiving her medical doctorate in 1940. In 1946 she married Samuel Rapoport, with whom she had four children. The couple had to flee to Europe in 1959 as their civil rights activism and membership in the Communist Party brought them to the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Ich habe die [Doktor]Arbeit ja nicht um meiner selbst willen verteidigt; die ganze Situation war für mich auch gar nicht so einfach mit 102 Jahren. Ich habe es für die Opfer gemacht.
Rapoport worked as a pediatrician in Berlin, where she gained her professorship in 1958, and set up a department for neonatal medicine at Charité. In 1964 she was appointed professor of pediatrics and from 1969 she held Europe’s first chair in neonatology. In 2015 she defended her doctoral thesis from 1938 at the age of 102, becoming the oldest per-son to ever receive a doctorate. Ingeborg Rapoport made an extraordinary contribution to reducing infant mortality.