Dr. med.
Henri Naphtali Schwab
1891 - 1983

Heinrich (later Henri and Henry) Naphtali Schwab was born on December 11, 1891 in Hochfelden, Alsace, which was then part of Germany. His father, Moritz Schwab, was a school principal in Strasbourg and married Clemence Levy in 1889. Henri Schwab’s older sister, Camille Laure, was born on August 26, 1890, and his younger sister, Alice Marguerite, on September 14, 1893. The Schwab family professed the Jewish faith.

Education and places to work

After studying medicine, Henri Schwab received his doctorate in Germany in August 1914. In the same year, he was already working as an assistant physician at the University Hospital in Strasbourg.

Henri Schwab worked closely with his distant relative, the Jewish internist and pathophysiologist Professor Leon Blum (1878-1930), who had been director of Medical Clinic B since 1919, following the end of the First World War and the restructuring of the now French Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg, and who was responsible for the clinical and scientific laboratories.  Blum was broadly educated, having trained with Carl Anton Ewald in Berlin and with Fernand Widal in Paris. Professor Blum initially worked an assistant to Bernhard Naunyn in Strasbourg.

Blum’s research focused on diabetes mellitus; he was the first European to produce insulin on a semi-industrial scale. Henri Schwab was the first individual in France to use insulin to treat diabetes mellitus. In 1923, Blum and Henri Schwab published the groundbreaking article “Le traitement du diabéte sucré par l’insuline” in La Presse Medicale in France. In the same year, Leon Blum and Henri Schwab published further medical articles together.

In 1925, Henri Schwab moved to the Tenon Hospital in Paris as a specialist in nutritional medicine. He also opened his own practice with the same focus at 8 Rue Freycinet in Paris. Dr. Schwab was also employed as an assistant at the Institute of Pharmacology at the University Hospital of Paris. Simultaneously, he continued to run his practice in Strasbourg, which he had opened in 1924.

In 1929 and 1930, Dr. Schwab published several articles in specialist journals. In 1935, he was awarded the French order “Chevalier de la légion d’honneur” for his medical work.

Henri Schwab’s apartment in Paris was located in the immediate vicinity of his practice, at 17 Rue Freycinet. He lived here for a time with his sister Marguerite until she married for the second time in 1934.

After 1933

Escape to the US via the Dominican Republic in 1940

In 1940, Henri Schwab fled to the US via the Dominican Republic. He left Ciudad Trujillo (capital of the Dominican Republic, renamed Santo Domingo in 1961) on August 26, 1940 and arrived in New York City on the ship Borinquen. In New York city, he initially lived at 40 East 45th Street and later found work in a research laboratory at 229 East 49th Street.

Later, he ran a successful internal medicine practice in New York and traveled regularly to France after the war to visit his family. After retiring, he moved back to France and lived in the very elegant and venerable “Hotel de Paris” in Monaco. He spent the last years of his life in a retirement home in Le Rouret, a small town in Provence-Alpes-Côte D’Azur. He died there on December 3, 1983, at the age of 92.