Prof. Dr. med.
Julius Donath
1870 - 1950

Julius Donath grew up in a Jewish family in Vienna. His father, Leopold Ludwig Jacob Donath (1835-1883), was a businessman, Leopold Donath married Ida Donath, née Roth (1848-1921) on August 9, 1868, in Vienna.

After graduating from the Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium in 1889, Julius Donath studied at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna. He completed his studies with the state examination and his doctorate in 1895

Education and Places of Work

Julius Donath started his clinical training in 1895 as an intern at the First Medical University Clinic under the direction of Prof. Hermann Nothnagel. Afterwards, he completed his medical training  at the Clinic for Skin Diseases and then at the First Surgical Department of the Vienna General Hospital. From May 1898 until November 1898, Julius Donath worked at the Vienna General Polyclinic under the supervision of Julius Mannaberg. From November 1898 until July 1, 1907, J. Donath worked as a medical resident at the First Medical University Clinic in Vienna again under the directorship of Prof. Hermann Nothnagel, where he remained until 1905.

Hermann Nothnagel (born in 1841 in Alt-Lietzegöricke, Mark Brandenburg, died in 1905 in Vienna) studied and received his doctorate in Berlin in 1863 and qualified as a professor of internal medicine in 1866 in Königsberg, Prussia. In 1882, he was appointed director of the First Medical University Clinic in Vienna. He published groundbreaking work on the physiology and pathology of the nervous system and the intestines. He investigated the mechanism of intestinal peristalsis and described colitis membranacea. Nothnagel earned particular distinction as an opponent of anti-Semitism. Together with Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, husband of the later Nobel Peace Prize winner Bertha von Suttner, he founded the “Association for the Defense Against Anti-Semitism” in Vienna in 1891 and became its honorary president. Furthermore, in 1901, he co-founded the “Society for Internal Medicine and Pediatrics in Vienna” and remained its president until his death.

In 1905, J. Donath qualified as a professor of internal medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna with a thesis on paroxysmal cold hemoglobinuria (“Donath-Landsteiner syndrome,” “Donath-Landsteiner hemolysis test,” etc.), caused by lysine.

Dr. Donath published papers with Karl Landsteiner both in 1904 and in 1925, where the terms “toxin” and “blood poison” replaced amboceptor, which at that time was used to refer to antibodies or autoantibodies at the time (cf. D. Goltz, Clio.Med. 1982).

In July 1910, Dr. Donath was appointed the position of chief physician at the Second Medical Clinic of the newly established Vienna Merchants’ Hospital in the 19th district of Vienna, Döbling. Additionally, he was appointed associate professor at the University of Vienna in 1927.

Up until February 1938, he worked as a consulting physician for the health insurance fund for commercial employees.

1933 – 1950

After the German Wehrmacht marched into Austria and the country was annexed to the German Reich, Julius Donath suffered persecuted as a Jew. On April 22, 1938, Professor Donath was removed from office (his “venia legendi” revoked) and dismissed from the University of Vienna. Afterwards, he was allowed to practice as a so-called “Krankenbehandler” (medical practitioner), exclusively treating Jewish patients. In October 1938, he accepted the position as the Chief of the Department of Internal Medicine at the Hospital of the Jewish Community (Rothschild Hospital).

Dr. Donath was protected in part to his non-Jewish wife Anna, née Kindler (1883 to 1962) and consequently survived the Nazi dictatorship in Vienna. After Austria’s liberation by Allied troops, he remained in his position as head of the internal medicine department at the hospital of the Jewish Community (Rothschild Hospital).

Julius Donath died at the age of 80 on January 1, 1950, in Vienna. His preserved grave is located at the Feuerhalle Simmering urn cemetery in Vienna’s 11th district.

Julius Donath’s younger sister, Sophie Hahn, who was born in Vienna in 1878, was deported from Vienna on October 5, 1942, to the Maly Trostinez estate near Minsk, in the German-occupied Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Upon arrival to the Maly Trostinez estate on October 9, 1942, Sophie Hahn was murdered immediately