Ingeborg Rapoport

Ingeborg Rapoport (1912 to 2017) was a German pediatrician who became a leading figure in East German neonatal medicine. Born Ingeborg Syllm in Kribi in the German colony of Kamerun, she grew up in Hamburg, passed the state medical examination in 1937 and wrote a doctoral thesis on diphtheria, but the Nazi racial laws, which classed her as part Jewish through her mother, barred her from defending it. She emigrated to the United States in 1938, completed her medical education at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and worked at the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati. After the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated her and her husband, they left the country, and in 1952 she settled in East Germany, where she founded the first clinic of neonatology in Germany, became professor of neonatology in 1969 and retired in 1973. In 2015, at the age of 102, she passed an oral examination on her old thesis at Hamburg and became the oldest person to receive a doctorate.