Dr. Feelgood (8 page)

One late afternoon in 1932, a Brown Shirt knocked furiously on Max’s door. Max told the young man that because he was a Jewish doctor, he was not allowed to see or treat him. But the man pushed his way into the office and whispered that he couldn’t talk to an Aryan physician because he had contracted gonorrhea. This impurity was forbidden in the ranks of the Brown Shirts and would have meant the man’s expulsion and punishment. Hence, his only choice was to talk to a Jewish doctor, also a forbidden act in Nazi Germany.

Max treated him and then heard the terrible information. “I am grateful to you,” the Brown Shirt said, looking menacingly at the doctor. “Here is how I’ll prove my gratitude. Your life is in acute danger. You are on the list of our ‘Roll Kommando.” Roll Kommando was a special unit of the Brown Shirt secret police, almost like an assassination unit, formed to eliminate those whom the Reich deemed “undesirables.” Jewish professionals or prominent Jews were high on the list. Max got the message: Get out fast. Max and Alice and their very young son, Thomas, fled from Berlin the very next day, heading for Prague and the home of Alice’s parents. Max was fortunate to have pulled up stakes so quickly, because the day after he left Germany, his nurse, a woman who had worked for him for many years, was arrested, and Max had to hire a Nazi lawyer to get her freed. Max had begun the next phase of his life, an émigré fleeing that would, in just a few years, become the Holocaust and the extermination of six million of Europe’s Jewish population.

“Decisions are simple when there are no alternatives.”

—Dr. Max Jacobson

Jacobson might have felt an immediate respite from danger when he, his wife, and his child crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia, but that respite didn’t last for long. Nor did the feeling of freedom because, after recovering from the disorientation and shock at immigration, Jacobson believed that he had no hope of reestablishing his medical practice in Prague. He’d left everything behind in Berlin: his possessions, his equipment, his medicines, and his instruments. Moreover, he believed (and history would prove him right) that there was the threat of imminent invasion and occupation by the Nazis, making any permanent settlement in Prague a danger. After all, when the Nazis came to power, their first targets were the Jews. And among the Jews, the professionals, particularly the high-profile professionals, were viewed as undesirables.

At first, the Jacobsons moved in with Alice’s parents, but the apartment was simply too small. Jacobson then got his family their own apartment upstairs from the Lowners, where he and Alice raised Tom. It gave him time to, as he once put it, “rationalize” the family’s situation. They had been uprooted, shocked, and completely disoriented by the move. He and his small family were being supported by Alice’s parents because he was not earning any income from his medical practice, but he was embarrassed by having to rely on them for help and support. He had to get back into his medical practice, but how and where? Also, Golder Prague, Slata Praha in Czech, was very different from Berlin and off-putting if one had not grown up there. Jacobson remembered that the Waczlavske Namesti, or Wenzel Street, was almost like a Rodeo Drive in today’s Beverly Hills, California—a beautiful thoroughfare with expensive shops that, like parts of the Sunset Strip, rose slowly up a hill to a Hradchin, or castle-like chateau.

Jacobson was entranced by the carnival-like atmosphere of pre-war Prague: the food, the arcades, the desserts, and the coffee houses. It was in the coffee houses that he found social gatherings almost like what the British call “high tea,” a late afternoon informal refreshment in which friends and family gathered before continuing with the rest of their day. He was also impressed by the huge ballrooms, which were more than three stories underground. The excavations that carved these out and then decorated them were massive undertakings. Inside the ballrooms, visitors from the rest of Europe, especially Paris, would gather for celebrations.

Because he was not working, Jacobson found he had time to explore the streets of Prague, especially the historical sites in the medieval city. Among other places, he visited the Altneuschul, where the celebrated Kabalistic Rabbi Loew taught and delivered his sermons. In the folklore of eastern Judaism, Rabbi Loew was known as the creator of the Golem, the evil spirit, which would go out into the world and carry out its master’s wishes even if it meant inflicting harm on an adversary.

Jacobson’s self-enforced prohibition to practice medicine was bothering him. He not only was precluded from treating patients because he had no license in Prague, but also was not engaging in any research at all. Privately, he was treating his wife and her family and a close circle of friends with his concoctions of methamphetamines, vitamins, and animal blood serum, but his practice was not public. However, as word of his energy-boosting injections spread beyond his small circle, new friends began praising his success and created a demand for his medicines, but opening up his practice to the general public would have put him in jeopardy. Because he was safe in Czechoslovakia, he did not seek to break any laws and become persona non grata in the country that had granted him asylum from the Nazis. He decided, therefore, to engage in medical research at the Czechoslovakian University.

Jacobson’s opportunity to begin research at the university presented itself in a serendipitous way. He came across an electric heating devise, a cooking utensil, that was essentially an insulated box heated by an electric coil. It gave him the inspiration to create something with which he could sterilize his instruments. He called this new device a Sterotherm, and it became his first patent.

After filing for his patent, Jacobson had to establish proof of concept. Would the device work, first of all, and next, on a practical level, how could the device get him back into medical practice? To establish proof of concept and the medical benefits of the device, he solicited and received the support of Professor Prochazka, director of the Hygienic Institute of the Czech University. He tested the machine with bacterial cultures and spores and found that all of the bacteria and spores were destroyed. The device sterilized the instruments being tested. The test was repeated in the United Kingdom, and the results also confirmed what the Hygienic Institute established. His invention worked to sterilize bacteria-laden instruments. As news spread about the Sterotherm, Jacobson began selling the device to physicians and dentists, all of whom reported that the machine was successful in their respective practices.

His next opportunity to demonstrate the success of the Sterotherm came when he was invited to show off the device in Paris. It also gave him the chance to get out of Prague, where he had become financially dependent on his in-laws, and to return to Paris. He had first visited Paris in 1931, before Hitler’s rise to power, where he met Charles Claoué. At that time Jacobson was the official doctor for the German Davis Cup Team.

Claoué was a medical doctor who ran his own plastic surgery clinic and had designed special surgical instruments, which he showed off in a documentary film he had made. He welcomed Jacobson to Paris, demonstrated his interest in Jacobson’s sterilization device, and renewed Jacobson’s interest in surgery. Jacobson was also impressed by the state of Parisian operating rooms (ORs). In contrast to surgical theaters in Germany, the French ORs were immaculate. Some of the French surgeons, he remembered, reminded him more of butchers than skilled technicians, but their results were excellent. Their methods and the facilities they worked in were far superior to those in Germany. In fact, every aspect of Parisian life was challenging and invigorating to him. Though not a self-proclaimed epicure, Jacobson remembered how impressed he was at the way the French arrayed and presented their food. Food, for the French, was artistic, not just utilitarian.

Jacobson had packed only a little luggage for his stay in Paris and had carried his sterilizer with him, of course. But, even though he said he planned to return to Prague, he only bought a one-way ticket to Paris. For the moment, there was no thought of return to Prague.

By the mid-1930s, Jacobson had settled in France and reestablished his medical practice in Paris, and he continued to develop serums composed of animal blood products, mixtures of vitamins A, B, C, and E, and amphetamines to boost a patient’s immunity and provide energy. It was in Paris where he came to a core realization that part of a doctor’s role was to make his patients feel good—not just better, but good, a feeling attested to by author Anais Nin. Nin became one of Jacobson’s patients in Paris after repeated visits to other doctors had failed to cure her persistent anemia and consequent lack of energy. Nin remarked in her diary, written between 1934 and 1939,
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that Jacobson’s own vigorous and dynamic personality was infectious in itself.

Nin wrote that she had been suffering from what she believed to be bronchitis that her French doctor could not cure. In fact, she would wake up at night coughing until she was almost choking. She was becoming desperate because the lack of sleep and the constant worry over her breathing was interfering with her ability to concentrate, to focus, and to write. Moreover, her constant loss of weight worried her because she did not know how serious her condition was. One of her friends mentioned to her that a refugee doctor from Germany had arrived in Paris and was treating a small group of patients who had made their careers in the arts. Nin made an appointment and visited him in his apartment. She was immediately impressed with him.

Nin said that as soon as she entered Jacobson’s apartment, she felt as if she were in the presence of someone unusual. He was animated, alert, and physically vital, she remembered. He was intuitive, unlike doctors she had known who relied on a bedside manner to elicit patient symptoms. His “piercing” and “brilliant” eyes, Nin wrote, immediately struck her, as did his manner. The doctor did not engage in much dialogue and didn’t ask for a list of her symptoms. He watched her intently as he examined her, reading her body like a book. Nin described him as a “clairvoyant” who could read a patient’s problems as soon as the patient entered the examination room. She was impressed by the fact that Max had none of a doctor’s usual mannerisms: the careful listening, the routine pressing of a patient for precise description of symptoms, or the endless testing to make sure there were no mistakes in diagnosis. As if Jacobson could see inside her, he immediately diagnosed Nin as having whooping cough and, she wrote, with only one injection she was brought back to health. Nin wrote that from the moment Jacobson injected her with a substance that made her feel better, she had a “blind faith” not only in his abilities, but also in him as a person. She wanted to become friends and invited Jacobson and Nia Aliceto dinner.

Anais Nin believed in free thought. She was not a communist, even though communism was coming into fashion among Europe’s intellectual elite. Nin was not especially dogmatic, not aligning her personal philosophy with a political system, but she had friends who were communists. Jacobson, too, soon become friends with many in Nin’s circle, acquiring many of them as patients, and soon became associated with communist sympathizers, as well.

By 1936, Europe was on the verge of war. Hitler was proclaiming “Anschluss” and eyeing the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. Jews in Europe who had the means to escape were already leaving, most of them went to the United States. Jacobson was no exception; he emigrated to New York in 1936 because he saw the war clouds drifting over Europe and wanted to be separated from them by an ocean. However, by the time Jacobson had come to the United States, according to his FBI and CIA records, he had become associated with a number of “known Soviet agents.” Some of the communist sympathizers identified by the FBI were members of the artistic and literary communities and were more free thinkers, just like Jacobson himself, than political activists—and New York had become a haven for free-thinking artists. The world was still at peace when Dr. Max Jacobson relocated to New York in 1936 and set up practice in Manhattan at East 72nd Street and Third Avenue as a general practitioner. He immediately attracted patients.

Jacobson had written in his diary as early as the 1920s that he was frustrated by the helplessness of his patients who suffered from neuromuscular disease. As he built his new practice in the United States, he continued to study ways of treating the disease. With the drugs he concocted himself, he felt that he could begin to help alleviate his patients’ suffering. Jacobson’s mantra was that he treated patients, not diseases. He used an individualized combination of hormones, Vitamin B complex, certain enzymes, Vitamins A and E, Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and procaine, a local anesthetic injected intramuscularly (also known under its brand name, Novocaine), depending on each patient’s needs. He said that he also recognized through experimentation that small amounts of amphetamines added to his medication increased the medication’s therapeutic effect. The amount Jacobson categorized as “small” was twenty milligrams per dose, five times the recommended dosage, but less than the forty milligrams prescribed for alcoholics at that time. It was Jacobson’s medical opinion that when methamphetamine was combined with steroids, hormones, and vitamins, it worked differently than when administered by itself.

The addition of methamphetamine to his mixtures, he said, alleviated the heavy fatigue, dizziness, and nausea of medications recommended by medical textbooks at the time. Jacobson claimed that he was able to eliminate such side effects by combining enzymes, steroids, and stimulants along with a drug called Amvitol, which was supposed to remedy physical and mental fatigue and depression. He said that he was encouraged by his initial tests of his drugs on himself to conduct laboratory analyses of his drugs by enlisting the help of the Food and Drug Laboratory in Maspeth, Long Island. From that testing, which helped determine a “bio-essay” of the formula, Jacobson said he found that amphetamines, in combination with vitamins, steroids, and enzymes in proportions configured to each individual patient, eliminated the toxic effects of the amphetamines without diminishing the stimulant effects. Thus, he believed, he was correct in his assumption that he had created an entirely new pharmaceutical compound. At least, that’s what he told himself. It allowed him, he believed, to derive the most beneficial effect of amphetamines without any toxicity, with smaller individual doses for each patient, and with doses administered less frequently than the textbook-recommended doses.
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