Peter Janovsky

Hitler’s Doctor: Treating History in a Novel Way

Dr. Eduard Bloch had the dubious distinction of serving as the Hitler family physician when Adolf was a boy (from about 1903 to 1907). As a result, he became the only known Jew whose escape from Europe was enabled by Hitler himself. Author Jay Neugeboren learned about Bloch while reading Ron Rosenbaum’s “Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil” (Random House, 1998), and integrated Bloch’s story into a novel he was already writing about Elizabeth Rothman, a medical illustrator working with surgeons at Johns Hopkins in the 1930s and ‘40s.