The Life of Max Meyerhof through his correspondence

Max Meyerhof, born in 1874 as the only son of a German-Jewish family in Hildesheim, spent half his life in Cairo, where he died in 1945, shortly before the end of the war. He practiced as a successful ophthalmologist, who was said to be able to cure even the blind, and participated in the establishment of a polyclinic for the poor. Autodidactically, he trained himself as a medical historian and orientalist, collected old manuscripts and opened up these sources of Arabic and Jewish medicine of the Middle Ages. His various correspondence partners reflect this development to some extent. In both fields, he acted as a mediator for the exchange and a new understanding of the achievements in East and West, which are ultimately based on a common cultural heritage of the past centuries. 

Scholarly Correspondences Among Orientalists during the Early and Late Modern Period as a Historical Source: A Series of Lectures. The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship@IAS). For additional information on this event and the lecture series visit: https://albert.ias.edu/20.500.12111/8044.