Klosowski's surgical experience

[HelenaWojtczak]

Hi C.D., Dave, Gareth

What Dave is referring to above is something unsourced in R Michael Gordon's newest book The Poison Murders of JtR where he says that the Polish army came calling in 1886, Klosowski was able to receive a year long extension, and then come draft time in 1887 he fled to London. Implying that his move to London was in a draft-dodging move rather than fleeing from some crime (which Gordon suggests is equally possible as well).

Edit: To make this a bit on-topic, it is suggested in this book that it was his surgical experience which initiated the draft attempt by the Polish govt.

JM

Found out some things so came to update this thread.

1. There was no Polish army in the 1880s. There was only the Russian army, as Poland was under Russian occupation.

2. "it was his surgical experience which initiated the draft attempt" . No. All males were liable for conscription at age 20. Seweryn hit 20 in December 1886. What I don't know is, did every male receive draft papers on his 20th birthday? Or were they picked at random? Would he not be exempt because he was still a student? If so, would they have come for him as soon as he took that junior surgeon exam, thus no longer being a student? Is that why he didn't take the exam?

Yes I know I'm asking more questions than answering old ones!

3. Lastly, please stop calling him a barber-surgeon. He wasn't one! He was a feldsher, for which there was no equivalent English role at the time. The closest English equivalent now is a nurse-practitioner.

[HelenaWojtczak]

Just discovered a large Rapaport family, from Poland, living in Davis Mansions, New Goulston Street, in 1901, and a Rappaport family in Old Montague St, Whitechapel, in 1891.

There are a few more scattered about, even in the 1881 census.

I wonder if any of them were, by chance, related to Mosze? And if so, did Klosowski lodge with them when he first came here, or did he look for them, claiming acquaintance to their relation back home in order to seek their help, as a new immigrant? I guess we will never know.

[Sam Flynn]

Another grandson for Moshko?

"Nesza Kawa nee Rapaport was born in Zwoleń in 1872 to Mosze and Henia. Prior to WWII she lived in Konin, Poland. During the war she was in Zagorow, Poland. Nesza perished in 1941 in Kazimierz, Poland at the age of 71."

"In 1900 there was only one elderly Jewish doctor in Konin. The [doctors'] numbers grew after the First World War, and included two former pupils of the Jewish Gymnasium, Isador Kawa and Felig Bulka."

Theo Richmond: "Konin - A Quest" (Jonathan Cape/Random House, 1995).

[Sam Flynn]

Moshko Rappaport

I'm new to this forum, and just found out about the link between DR. RAPPAPORT and jack the ripper suspect.
I'm searching for ANY possible information regarding DR. RAPPAPORT AND FAMILY from Zwolen. Especially: documents and photos.
Thank you!!

No photos or documents - hardly surprising given the fate of his family (see below) - however, I've managed to find out quite a bit about Rappaport and his family, as follows:

MARRIAGE OF MOSHKO RAP(P)APORT

Event: Marriage; Year: 1866
RAPAPORT, Mosiek (Bridegroom), age 19. Father: Izrael; Mother: Perla
SZLAFERMAN, Chana Liwcia (Bride), age 16. Father: Abram; Mother: Idessa

Mosiek (also spelt "Moszek" - both alternatives for "Moshko" or Moses) and Chana Liwcia (variously rendered as "Chena Lefka", "Gena", or "Hena Libca") had four girls born in 1870, 72, 74 and 76: their names were Perla, Nesza, Sura and Hadessa respectively. (Source: Jewishgen.org)

This is the only Moshko Rapaport I could find in Zwoleń at the right period, and he'd have been of about the right age (circa 35) to have had a 15-year old apprentice in about 1880. I've no doubt it's him, on that basis. It's interesting to note that there was a toddler in the Rapaport household at the time Severin Kłosowski started his apprenticeship. A useful grounding in child-care, perhaps, for which Mrs Ethel Radin would have cause to be grateful some eight years later.


DEATH OF MOSHKO RAPPAPORT

Akta notarialne; 1910-1910; indeksu: Zwoleń; Rapaport Moszek

Unfortunately, the Polish Government withdrew from supporting "Free BMD" type initiatives on the Web in 2006, therefore whatever info this "indeksu" contained is not available. I could only find the above record (from baza.archiwa.gov.pl) by stealth, as the current website is "blind" to that information, and I could only retrieve it from Google cache.


RAPPAPORT'S FAMILY - YAD VASHEM HOLOCAUST RECORDS

Some entries from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial site, which probably refer to Mosze/Moshe and Hen(i)a Rapaport's family in Zwoleń. There are other matches, but these almost certainly refer to Moshko's children and grandchildren:

1. It seems that Moshko's second daughter witnessed many tragedies in her long life. Her name, place and date of birth are a certain match:

"Nesza Kawa nee Rapaport was born in Zwoleń in 1872 to Mosze and Henia. Prior to WWII she lived in Konin, Poland. During the war she was in Zagorow, Poland. Nesza perished in 1941 in Kazimierz, Poland at the age of 71."


2. Almost certainly Moshko's son - note his occupation:

"Keufel Rappoport was born in Zwolin in 1888 to Moshe and Hena. He was a paramedic and married to Yehudit. Prior to WWII he lived in Zwolin, Poland. During the war he was in Zwolin. Keufel perished in Garbatka, Poland."


3. A daughter in middle-age? (Zwolin/Zwoleń being part of Radom)

Gutsze Bressler nee Rapaport was born in Radom in 1895 to Moshe and Hena. She was a housewife and married. Prior to WWII she lived in Zwolin. During the war she was in Zwolin. Gutsze perished in Treblinka, Poland."


4. A possible grandson - note his occupation again, and indeed his and his mother's name:

"Moszko Rapaport was born in Zwolin in 1921 to Sara [cf "Sura", b. 1874 above]. He was a dentist and single. Prior to WWII he lived in Zwolin, Poland. During the war he was in Zwolin, Poland. Moszko perished in 1941 in Treblinka, Poland."

[LSE]

Dr. Rappaport

Hello,
I'm new to this forum, and just found out about the link between DR. RAPPAPORT and jack the ripper suspect.
I'm searching for ANY possible information regarding DR. RAPPAPORT AND FAMILY from Zwolen. Especially: documents and photos.
Thank you!!

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks PH ! we are going from Thebes to Abu Simbel -down the Nile---my daughter ,myself and two of our friends-

[protohistorian]

I dont really have time to give this the thought it deserves at the moment ,PH-I am going to Egypt Sunday for 8 days!
However,I can see why you have drawn that conclusion about his state of mind .When I get back I"ll try and get Adams"s book.
He seems to me to have been a bit of a fantasist and quite detached from reality.When he bought his boat in Hastings for example he boasted he was going to sail it to Boulogne,he also dressed himself up in sailor gear--- in the mean time was shaving customers and conducting singalongs in the barber"s shop with his wife at the piano .Then he got tired of it all,packed up,poisoned that wife,poor woman, and moved on to new things -running a pub this time -if I remember rightly- with a new wife back in London-just like that!
When Lucy Baderski,his first wife [in this country anyway] saw him again ,he denied he had ever met her-this was at his trial for murder in 1903 .She said something like -"oh yes you do remember me,you took a knife to me and told me you would cut my head off"----and he just stared right through her.
Another time he was posing as an American who hunted big game---but apparently all he ever shot were the rats in his cellar.
I am not sure he was that well a cookie really.

Have fun in Egypt...stay safe and be well, I see you on the flipside!

[Natalie Severn]

The vitorian nomenclature of Megalomaniac has no modern equivalent. A good start is extreme, malignant narcissisim. It is a world view in which the holder is NEVER responsible for the things that happen to him. The holder is not subject to the rules because he/she is "above" them. The holder of this worldview feels infanitely entitled and capable. From the perspective of the holder no one is as good as they are, he/she has no contemporaries, and is prone to interpret all actions short of kissing his ass in a negative light. In the Trial of George Chapman Chapman never admits being Severin, calls M.D. "Idiots" and syas of friends " I don't have any." A strong case can be made for him being one. Respectfully

I dont really have time to give this the thought it deserves at the moment ,PH-I am going to Egypt Sunday for 8 days!
However,I can see why you have drawn that conclusion about his state of mind .When I get back I"ll try and get Adams"s book.
He seems to me to have been a bit of a fantasist and quite detached from reality.When he bought his boat in Hastings for example he boasted he was going to sail it to Boulogne,he also dressed himself up in sailor gear--- in the mean time was shaving customers and conducting singalongs in the barber"s shop with his wife at the piano .Then he got tired of it all,packed up,poisoned that wife,poor woman, and moved on to new things -running a pub this time -if I remember rightly- with a new wife back in London-just like that!
When Lucy Baderski,his first wife [in this country anyway] saw him again ,he denied he had ever met her-this was at his trial for murder in 1903 .She said something like -"oh yes you do remember me,you took a knife to me and told me you would cut my head off"----and he just stared right through her.
Another time he was posing as an American who hunted big game---but apparently all he ever shot were the rats in his cellar.
I am not sure he was that well a cookie really.

[protohistorian]

Hi PH,

Your posts have been very impressive so far and you have refrained from naming Chapman as the Ripper. At the same time, I see a little Cornwell creeping in, i.e., picking a suspect and fashioning the evidence to support that conclusion. Be careful you don't go that route.

c.d.

I am trying not to, keep me in line though, I drift in and out of reality with startling frequency!

[c.d.]

Hi PH,

Your posts have been very impressive so far and you have refrained from naming Chapman as the Ripper. At the same time, I see a little Cornwell creeping in, i.e., picking a suspect and fashioning the evidence to support that conclusion. Be careful you don't go that route.

c.d.

[protohistorian]

Thats an interesting take on it PH,I must admit.
I tend to see a restless itinerant man,possibly with frustrated medical ambitions at that point ,arriving in England unable to pick up where he had left off .Since that point coincided with having had practical experience in a hospital and possibly witnessing and even assisting with the bandaging of patients who had received "invasive surgery",he may have been prompted to do a bit of it himself if you see what I mean.I would think Chapman soon got pretty bored with the palliative surgery he was qualified in .
We dont know exactly what he was introduced to in the five month practical course at Prago hospital, but just doing the rounds of the wards would have been bound to have been an eye-opener.

I dont know either whether I see him as a "meglomaniac" .Perhaps.
But I wonder if he too was mentally ill in the sense that he heard voices telling him first to carry out the gruesome murders of 1888 and later telling him to poison his wives .
By the way, Caesarians and Appendectomies had become much more common throughout Europe in the 1880"s.Its possible that he was a bit thwarted finding himself unable to do these operations,having seen them in practice at the Prago Hospital.

The vitorian nomenclature of Megalomaniac has no modern equivalent. A good start is extreme, malignant narcissisim. It is a world view in which the holder is NEVER responsible for the things that happen to him. The holder is not subject to the rules because he/she is "above" them. The holder of this worldview feels infanitely entitled and capable. From the perspective of the holder no one is as good as they are, he/she has no contemporaries, and is prone to interpret all actions short of kissing his ass in a negative light. In the Trial of George Chapman Chapman never admits being Severin, calls M.D. "Idiots" and syas of friends " I don't have any." A strong case can be made for him being one. Respectfully

[Natalie Severn]

The limited scope of education is the point. If his education had been more advanced, the morphology of wounds would be different. The patterning of wounds on the c5 suggest experimentation, and in Klosowski we have a meglomaniac, who having failed at the "traditional" vector of medicine, has taken it upon himself to educate himself. I believe that at least part of this can be seen in the quip he made to Maud's sister about Dr.'s being idiots, as a meglomaniac he is asserting the superiorty of "his" method over the traditional.

Thats an interesting take on it PH,I must admit.
I tend to see a restless itinerant man,possibly with frustrated medical ambitions at that point ,arriving in England unable to pick up where he had left off .Since that point coincided with having had practical experience in a hospital and possibly witnessing and even assisting with the bandaging of patients who had received "invasive surgery",he may have been prompted to do a bit of it himself if you see what I mean.I would think Chapman soon got pretty bored with the palliative surgery he was qualified in .
We dont know exactly what he was introduced to in the five month practical course at Prago hospital, but just doing the rounds of the wards would have been bound to have been an eye-opener.

I dont know either whether I see him as a "meglomaniac" .Perhaps.
But I wonder if he too was mentally ill in the sense that he heard voices telling him first to carry out the gruesome murders of 1888 and later telling him to poison his wives .
By the way, Caesarians and Appendectomies had become much more common throughout Europe in the 1880"s.Its possible that he was a bit thwarted finding himself unable to do these operations,having seen them in practice at the Prago Hospital.

[protohistorian]

Sam,
No matter how one tries to illustrate how Klosowski"s training matched almost in every particular with that of England,up to and including the 1850"s-[at earliest], you reject it while apparently refusing to go find out for yourself what actually happened in training for surgery here.

ALL SURGICAL TRAINING IN THE UK BEGAN WITH A FIVE YEAR APPRENTICESHIP no matter where you lived,whether in a tiny village in the North of England and were apprenticed for five years to the
local doctor or you lived in Lambeth and were as close as you get to Guy"s hospital nevertheless you DID NOT serve your 5 year apprenticeship,the precursor to all surgical training AT GUYS- that came after the five years were up when you followed it with a brief practical course at a hospital.That was how training in surgery began in the UK up until at least 1850 and probably up until the beginning of 1870.
I spoke about the cultural/ technological background to Poland,[Warsaw actually],because you seemed to be operating under the delusion that all things Polish were backward and seem to be so determined to prove Klosowski had inferior training that you posted a picture of a few huts to show where he had come from which is just so misleading and a bit puerile quite frankly.
I have been doing some research myself into the comparative
training that went on in England and its very clear that England was very much the backward country regarding the development of surgery ,building of hospitals,development of medical breakthroughs, well up until the 20th century .Before then all students who could afford it studied in Paris which had taken over from Vienna in in the 1840"s and by the 1890"s was the centre for all medicine and studies in medicine.
The jewel among all hospitals was Vienna"s Algemeine Kankenhaus [general hospital] up until well into the 19th century .As part of Emperor Joseph"s grand design for modernising the Hapsburg Empire, hospitals were also built in Olmutz, Linz and Prague.New infirmaries rapidly grew up at around the same time in Berlin, and the Ukraine where the huge Obukhov hospital had been built ,later called the Catherine the Great Hospital . All the most radical and exploratory surgery happened in and around Vienna and in these Eastern European hospitals,of which the Prago would have been a part .
Britain at that point in time was "well behind "by comparison and remained so until the last century!
However by the 1840"s France began to take the lead in pioneering developments in Europe ,when anaesthesia was introduced.
It was also in this period that many more records began to flood in of successful caesarians where the mother survived .Only a handful of mothers had survived up until the 1790"s ,whereas by the 1840"s records of women surviving caesarians all over Europe ,including Eastern Europe, began to appear .see Cambridge Illustrated History of medicine.Roy Porter isbn 0-521-44211-7

The limited scope of education is the point. If his education had been more advanced, the morphology of wounds would be different. The patterning of wounds on the c5 suggest experimentation, and in Klosowski we have a meglomaniac, who having failed at the "traditional" vector of medicine, has taken it upon himself to educate himself. I believe that at least part of this can be seen in the quip he made to Maud's sister about Dr.'s being idiots, as a meglomaniac he is asserting the superiorty of "his" method over the traditional.

[Natalie Severn]

Sam,you are wrong

Thanks, Dave - but, again we're not talking about a full-on university education in the case of Klosowski. We're talking about a primary education in a small village, a teenage apprenticeship to a small-town doctor, leading to a four-month course in practical surgery at a Warsaw hospital.

Sam,
No matter how one tries to illustrate how Klosowski"s training matched almost in every particular with that of England,up to and including the 1850"s-[at earliest], you reject it while apparently refusing to go find out for yourself what actually happened in training for surgery here.

ALL SURGICAL TRAINING IN THE UK BEGAN WITH A FIVE YEAR APPRENTICESHIP no matter where you lived,whether in a tiny village in the North of England and were apprenticed for five years to the
local doctor or you lived in Lambeth and were as close as you get to Guy"s hospital nevertheless you DID NOT serve your 5 year apprenticeship,the precursor to all surgical training AT GUYS- that came after the five years were up when you followed it with a brief practical course at a hospital.That was how training in surgery began in the UK up until at least 1850 and probably up until the beginning of 1870.
I spoke about the cultural/ technological background to Poland,[Warsaw actually],because you seemed to be operating under the delusion that all things Polish were backward and seem to be so determined to prove Klosowski had inferior training that you posted a picture of a few huts to show where he had come from which is just so misleading and a bit puerile quite frankly.
I have been doing some research myself into the comparative
training that went on in England and its very clear that England was very much the backward country regarding the development of surgery ,building of hospitals,development of medical breakthroughs, well up until the 20th century .Before then all students who could afford it studied in Paris which had taken over from Vienna in in the 1840"s and by the 1890"s was the centre for all medicine and studies in medicine.
The jewel among all hospitals was Vienna"s Algemeine Kankenhaus [general hospital] up until well into the 19th century .As part of Emperor Joseph"s grand design for modernising the Hapsburg Empire, hospitals were also built in Olmutz, Linz and Prague.New infirmaries rapidly grew up at around the same time in Berlin, and the Ukraine where the huge Obukhov hospital had been built ,later called the Catherine the Great Hospital . All the most radical and exploratory surgery happened in and around Vienna and in these Eastern European hospitals,of which the Prago would have been a part .
Britain at that point in time was "well behind "by comparison and remained so until the last century!
However by the 1840"s France began to take the lead in pioneering developments in Europe ,when anaesthesia was introduced.
It was also in this period that many more records began to flood in of successful caesarians where the mother survived .Only a handful of mothers had survived up until the 1790"s ,whereas by the 1840"s records of women surviving caesarians all over Europe ,including Eastern Europe, began to appear .see Cambridge Illustrated History of medicine.Roy Porter isbn 0-521-44211-7

[protohistorian]

Thanks, Dave - but, again we're not talking about a full-on university education in the case of Klosowski. We're talking about a primary education in a small village, a teenage apprenticeship to a small-town doctor, leading to a four-month course in practical surgery at a Warsaw hospital.

That makes it fit even better. In a traditional University education, he would have been exposed to the viscera and it's characteristics, there would be no need to experiment. It is precisely his limited exposure coupled with meglomania, that lead him to believe that through experimentation he could achieve an accurate understanding. See it from his mind, and the subsequent experimentation in wounds follows a trejectory that he believed would make him a "doctor", not in our sense but in his sense of be able to exert action on a human body.