Fritz Katz (born in 1898 in near Hindenburg, Prussian

Silesia Silesia (, also , ) is a historical region of Central Europe that lies mostly within Poland, with small parts in the Czech Republic and Germany. Its area is approximately , and the population is estimated at around 8,000,000. Silesia is spli ...

; died in 1969 in

Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh List ...

) was a pioneer in

organ transplant Organ transplantation is a medical procedure in which an organ (anatomy), organ is removed from one body and placed in the body of a recipient, to replace a damaged or missing organ. The donor and recipient may be at the same location, or organ ...

techniques, performing one of the first successful grafts of

adrenal gland The adrenal glands (also known as suprarenal glands) are endocrine glands that produce a variety of hormones including adrenaline and the steroids aldosterone and cortisol. They are found above the kidneys. Each gland has an outer cortex w ...

s. After appointments at the medical faculties at Breslau, Fribourg, Frankfurt and Berlin, in the late 1920s he went to

Alexandria, Egypt Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...

, where he became the chief surgeon at the Jewish Hospital. The hospital was supported by donations from the Jewish community; its staff were of all faiths and its services were freely available to Jews, Christians, Muslims and others. In 1941, as reported in the ''British Medical Journal'', Dr Katz performed one of the first successful adrenal gland grafts in medical history, saving the life of a patient who had not responded to synthetic hormones and drugs. Katz was a very public figure, widely known and greatly admired in Alexandria, and had a tendency to be outspoken, a quality which did not put him in good stead with the Nasser regime. In 1959 he was charged with

spying Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangibl ...

for Israel; he was tortured, convicted, and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life and in 1962 he was released following diplomatic intervention by the West German government and many professional testimonials from around the world. By then almost the entire Jewish community in Alexandria and the rest of Egypt had been driven out by the regime. Broken by his experiences in prison, Katz lived out the remainder of his life quietly in Switzerland and died while on a visit to Athens in 1969 at the age of 71.

References

* André Aciman, ''Out of Egypt'', Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1994, p 227. *Michael Haag, ''Vintage Alexandria'', The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo and New York, 2008, p 132.

External links

*https://web.archive.org/web/20071123202704/http://www.iflac.com/jac/ *http://www.iflac.com/jac/jac/hospital.html
"Medicine: Glands From the Dead"
''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...

''. July 7, 1941. {{DEFAULTSORT:Katz, Fritz 1898 births 1969 deaths German emigrants to Greece German prisoners sentenced to death Immigrants to Egypt People convicted of spying for Israel Physicians from the Province of Silesia 20th-century surgeons Prisoners sentenced to death by Egypt