Emil Starkenstein

Emil Starkenstein was a Czech-Jewish pharmacologist and one of the founders of clinical pharmacology, born on 18 December 1884 in the Bohemian town of Pobezovice and killed on 6 November 1942 in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. He came from a family with many local physicians and published a family tree in 1927. He was a professor at the German University in Prague until the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and continued his work as a refugee in the Netherlands. After his death his wife donated more than 20,000 items of his papers to the Czechoslovak state, and his pharmacological library, focused on the medicinal uses of plants, was partly preserved by a rare book dealer.