Originally posted by Lechmere
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The man to whom he was apprenticed was not a surgeon. He was a feldscher, and, as such, was not qualified to take a 14 year-old-boy who had received only 6 years of village elementary school education and send him out into the world 4 years later as a surgeon, ready to cut open bodies and remove organs. (The very idea is risible.)
All official documents in Poland were in Russian. (In court Petrykowski said "I know the Russian language" as his qualification to translate them.)
The Polish word for surgeon is "chirurg", not "felczer". Rappaport appears in trade directories as a "felczer", as does his son, who was another of his apprentices and seems to have taken over the practice in Zwolen (see http://genealodzy.pl/PNphpBB2-printv...-start-0.phtml)
There was no English translation of the Polish and Russian words for feldscher (that's a German word, in Polish, it's "felczer") because we simply didn't have that grade of medic in our country at that time. So Mr P, for whom English was a third language (possibly fourth or even fifth if he knew German and/or Yiddish) had the choice of nurse, doctor, medical orderly or surgeon.
I have searched extensively for Petrykowski, hoping to find some reference to him in other court cases, some shred of evidence that he was a professional translator with an academic qualification for the task he was given, but to no avail. He's not even in the census. Since all Poles knew Russian, it's quite likely that he was just an ordinary Pole-in-the-street, a drinking pal of a policeman or court clerk, asked to help out informally.
If he gave it any thought, Mr P would have to reject "doctor", since. clearly, SK wasn't one. He could not say "nurse", since that was an all-female profession in England and would have made SK sound a bit silly. "Medical orderly" suggests someone with no medical skills at all, perhaps someone who just transports patients on stretchers and wheelchairs. That left "surgeon", and it seems that Mr P did not fuly understand what that word was going to mean in the 21st century.
The meaning of surgeon/surgery/surgical has changed over the years. The office that my doctor works from is called a "surgery" but no kidney transplant would ever take place there! A century ago the terms doctor/surgeon/physician were more interchangeable than they are today.
Today we reserve the word "surgeon" to mean specifically a qualified medical doctor who has undertaken additional training AFTER her or his medical degree in order to specialise in cutting open bodies. I can state categorically that SK was most definitely NOT a surgeon in our current meaning of the word.
I hope I have provided a comprehensive reply.
Helena
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