Jewish Invention Myths: The Appendectomy

Another recent ‘jewish invention’ myth is the claim by Marnie Winston-Macauley at ‘Aish’ that jews ‘invented’ the appendectomy – the operation used to remove part or all of the appendix – where she claims that it was invented/first performed by a jewish doctor named Simon Baruch in the United States. (1)

Now Baruch was indeed a real person and a medical doctor who does figure very briefly in the history of the appendectomy because he was a doctor who diagnosed appendicitis in a patient and then operated on it in the United States.

Cyrus Adler and Frederick de Sola Mendes claimed in the 1906 edition of the ‘Jewish Encyclopaedia’ that:

‘Another subject that attracted Baruch’s attention was the fatality of appendicitis when treated medically only, as was then the custom. Baruch’s insistence on the need of operation in a certain case, and his subsequent contributions to the diagnosis of appendicitis, make him the pioneer of this beneficent revolution in surgery.’ (2)

Now this all sounds great, but Baruch was only in fact credited with the first appendicitis surgery in his obituary in the ‘New York Times’ in 1921 (3) and the same source also helpfully gives us the date of the operation as occurring in 1889. (4)

This is not true since traditionally – as Columbia University explains on their website – the first appendectomy is credited to one Claudius Amyand:

‘In 1735, Dr. Claudius Amyand performed the world’s first successful appendectomy, at St. George’s Hospital in London. The patient was an 11-year old boy whose appendix had become perforated by a pin he had swallowed. The first successful operation to treat acute appendicitis was performed soon after, in 1759 in Bordeaux. General anesthesia was not available until 1846, so these operations required many assistants to restrain patients during what were undoubtedly very painful procedures.’ (5)

This however is somewhat incorrect since the first appendectomy was in fact accidentally performed by William Cookesley in the county of Devon in England in 1731, (6) while the first case of the surgical removal of the appendix triggered by appendicitis was in 1759 in the city of Bordeaux in France, although sometimes falsely credited to the Swiss doctor Rudolf Kronlein in 1884. (7)

Baruch is not credited with any significant innovation by modern surgery not was he even remotely the first to perform an appendectomy in general or an appendectomy where the patient had acute appendicitis.

So, no; the appendectomy is not a ‘jewish invention’ whatsoever.

References

(1) https://aish.com/91795029/

(2) https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2586-baruch-simon

(3) https://www.nytimes.com/1921/06/04/archives/dr-simon-baruch-long-ill-dies-at-80-pioneer-in-scientific.html

(4) Idem.

(5) https://columbiasurgery.org/news/2015/06/04/history-medicine-mysterious-appendix

(6) Cf. Peter Selley, 2016, ‘William Cookesley, William Hunter and the first patient to survive removal of the appendix in 1731 – a case history with 31 years’ follow up’, Journal of Medical Biography, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 180-183

(7) https://hekint.org/2017/01/22/the-early-days-in-the-history-of-appendectomy

(8) F. Charles Bruniardi (Ed.), 2015, ‘Schwartz’s Principles of Surgery’, 10^th Edition, McGraw-Hill: New York, p. 1241