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The Warsaw Ghetto Hunger Study was a study taken up by Jewish doctors imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. The Nazis, intent on starving the ghetto within months, allowed no more than 180 calories per prisoner - less than 1/10th the recommended caloric intake for a healthy human being, and even that was over-priced. Trying to overcome the want, black market trade thrived and the Joint had opened over 250 soup kitchens, to provide prisoners with better nutrition and a sense of community and cooperation.

In February 1942 a group of Jewish doctors headed by Israel Milejkowski decided to use the famine, which was out of their control, to study the physiological and psychological effects of hunger. Using Judenrat resources to acquire medical supplies, they commenced on a deep study of the various aspects of hunger: from metabolic and hormonal changes, through the circulatory and digestive systems, to changes in bone marrow, eyesight, and motivation. Despite the lack of resources, the risk of execution (Jews being prohibited by the Nazis from scientific work) and their own poor physical conditions, the 28 doctors managed to keep a strict study protocol including isolation, glycemic load testing, and even post-mortem pathology.

By the end of the study in August 1942 in the Grossaktion Warsaw, the doctors had studied 20 patients. The study manuscript was smuggled out of the ghetto and kept by the Polish doctor Witold Orłowski. Immediately after the end of the war in was published in Polish and French (1946), and then in English in 1979 by Myron Winick of Columbia University. Only one of the doctors who participated in the study survived the war.

According to Winick:

was the first time that semi-starvation of this magnitude was studied in such detail. The study began to connect the dots that have led to a detailed understanding of the overall adaptation the body makes to a lack of sufficient food. But historically there is, in my mind, an even more important place for this study. As far as I can tell, it is the only study of a lethal disease carried out in detail by a group of doctors all of whom were suffering from the same disease. And finally, perhaps most important of all, I believe that the performance of these physicians, all of whom knew that they were unlikely to survive, should go down in history as one of medicine's finest hours... remains the most detailed study of semi-starvation ever carried out. It has had a profound influence on the way we treat this disease.

References

1. ^ שני, איילת (2019-09-25). "המומחים הישראלים נדהמו: רופאים יהודים ערכו מחקר סודי על רעב בגטו ורשה". Haaretz. Retrieved 2019-09-27.
2. ^ Winick, Myron (2005-10-27). "Hunger Disease: Studies by the Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto, Their Historical Importance and Their Relevance Today" (PDF).
3. "What should my daily intake of calories be?". NHS. 2018-06-27. Retrieved 2019-10-10.
4. "Dr. Israel Milejkowski, a Jewish physician and civic activist in Warsaw". Ghetto Fighters House Archives. Retrieved 2019-09-27.
5. Engelking, Barbara (2002). Holocaust and memory : the experience of the Holocaust and its consequences : an investigation based on personal narratives. London: Leicester University Press, in association with the European Jewish Publication Society. pp. 110–111. ISBN 9780567342775. OCLC 741690863.
6. Apfelbaum, Emil (1946). Choroba głodowa: Badania kliniczne nad głodem wykonane w getcie warszawskim z roku 1942 (in Polish). Warsaw: American Joint Distribution Committee. OCLC 474722783.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
7. Falstein, Louis (1964). The martyrdom of Jewish physicians in Poland. The Medical Alliance - Association of Jewish Physicians from Poland, by Exposition Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

See also

• Winick, Myron (2007). Final stamp : the Jewish doctors in the Warsaw ghetto. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse. ISBN 9781425975432. OCLC 153582010.

• Warsaw Ghetto
• Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland
• History of medicine
• Health research
• Hunger
• Case series