C. Henry Kempe

C. Henry Kempe (1922 to 1984) was an American pediatrician, born Karl Heinz Kempe in Breslau, Germany, who is credited as the first in the medical community to identify and recognize child abuse. A Jewish refugee who reached the United States alone as a teenager after the Kindertransport, he trained at Berkeley, San Francisco and Yale, studied virology and helped develop vaccinia immune globulin against the complications of smallpox vaccination. In 1956 he became the youngest chairman of the pediatrics department at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. In 1962 he and his colleagues published The Battered-Child Syndrome, which led the medical profession to recognize child abuse, and his advocacy helped bring abuse reporting laws to all fifty states. With his wife Ruth he founded the Kempe Center in 1972, and the Kempe Award of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect bears his name.