Founded in 1852 as “The Jews Hospital in New York,” Mount Sinai has a fascinating, storied history which is little known to the general public. The hospital, founded to serve indigent immigrant Jews in desperate need of medical care, expanded from a brownstone on 28th Street to a 20-building complex serving 400,000 patients annually. A striking number of the major medical advances of the past century and a half began there, among them: the field of pediatrics, the modern method of blood transfusion, the use of oral medication for diabetes, and combination chemotherapy. Mt. Sinai opened its doors in the 1930s to Jewish doctors escaping Hitler’s Europe.

Dr. Arthur Aufses, who served for 21 years as the Chief of Surgery, and still works at the hospital today. His father, the son of German-Jewish immigrants, was a surgeon at Mount Sinai dating back to the 1920s – an era when strict quotas made it difficult for Jews to get into medical school. In addition, Dr. Aufses has written two published books on the hospital’s history.