14 Facts About Ludwik Hirszfeld

Ludwik Hirszfeld is considered a co-discoverer of the inheritance of ABO blood types.

Ludwik Hirszfeld was a cousin of Aleksander Rajchman, a Polish mathematician, and of Ludwik Rajchman, a Polish bacteriologist.

Ludwik Hirszfeld soon formed a close personal friendship with Dungern which proved to be scientifically fruitful.

Von Dungern and Ludwik Hirszfeld examined 348 individuals from 72 families and showed that blood groups A and B did not occur in the offspring unless they were present in at least one of the parents, fulfilling the Mendelian principles of inheritance.

Ludwik Hirszfeld gradually found the working conditions at Heidelberg too confining and to familiarize himself with the entire field of hygiene and microbiology, in 1911 he accepted an assistantship at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Zurich, just after he had married.

Ludwik Hirszfeld remained with the Serbian army until the end of the war, serving as serological and bacteriological adviser.

In 1914, together with R Klinger, Hirszfeld developed a serodiagnostic reaction test for syphilis, which did not replace the Wasserman test introduced in 1906.

Ludwik Hirszfeld soon became the deputy director and scientific head of the State Hygiene Institute in Warsaw and, in 1924, professor there.

On 20 February 1941 Ludwik Hirszfeld was forced to move into the Warsaw ghetto with his wife and daughter.

Ludwik Hirszfeld was helped there by the parish priest Marceli Godlewski.

Ludwik Hirszfeld described the living conditions in the ghetto in his book in The Story of One Life.

Ludwik Hirszfeld continued his research on blood groups and together with obstetrician prof.

Ludwik Hirszfeld received many honors, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Prague and Zurich.

Ludwik Hirszfeld wrote almost 400 works in German, French, English, and Polish, many in collaboration with other well-known scholars and many with his wife as well.