Haim Ernst Wertheimer

Haim Ernst Wertheimer was born in 1893 in Bühl

Wertheimer was born in 1893 in Bühl, in southwest Germany. He went to school in his hometown and in Baden-Baden.

In 1912 he began medical studies in Berlin, Bonn and Kiel. World War I interrupted his studies, and he served as a doctor in Flanders and Italy. After the war he finished his medical degree at Heidelberg University.

In 1920 and 1921 he worked as a doctor at the Berlin municipal orphanage. He then joined the Institute for Physiology at the University of Halle, where he became a privatdozent in 1923 and an associate professor in 1927. After the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed from his job.

In 1934 he moved to Mandate Palestine to serve as temporary director of the chemistry laboratory at the Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University. He worked there until 1963, heading the pharmacy section from 1942 to 1950 and the biochemistry department from 1953 to 1963. In the 1940s he studied the role of lipids with his student Benjamin Shapiro, and he served as dean in the 1950s.

He won the Israel Prize in 1956 and the Banting Medal in 1964. He died in 1978, and a stone bench in Rehavia, Jerusalem, stands in his memory.