Kurt Huldschinsky

Kurt Huldschinsky was a German pediatrician of Prussian heritage, born in Berlin in 1883. After medical studies he served as a field medic in the German army in the First World War, and afterwards worked as a practicing doctor and research scientist. In the winter of 1918 to 1919 he showed that rickets in children could be treated with mercury vapour lamps tuned to ultraviolet wavelengths, having first tried to adapt existing X-ray equipment. At that time perhaps half of all German children had rickets to some degree, and the biochemical action of sunlight on the skin was not yet understood. He received the Otto Heubner Prize of the German Association of Pediatrics in 1926 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Because he was Jewish he left Nazi Germany with his wife and daughter in 1934 and settled in Egypt, where he continued medical work and publishing until his death in Alexandria in 1940.