Hans Lehfeldt

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Hans Lehfeldt (born October 28, 1899 in Berlin , † June 18, 1993 in New York City ) was a German-American doctor and sex reformer who had to emigrate to the United States in 1934 .

Life

Lehfeldt studied medicine in Berlin and Munich and received his doctorate in Berlin in 1923. With Erwin Kehrer (1874–1959) in Dresden and during his training in Vienna , he specialized in the subjects of gynecology and obstetrics .

Back in Berlin, from 1928 on, he sat in on the sex researcher Ernst Graefenberg . Since the mid-1920s, Lehfeldt was friends with the British sex reformer Norman Haire (1892–1952), who gave him an appearance at the Copenhagen Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, on which contraception and birth control were discussed. Lehfeldt was heavily influenced by the American family planning pioneer Margaret Sanger . She gave several lectures on contraceptives in Europe , including in 1927 after the Geneva World Population Conference . Despite official restrictions, Lehfeldt and colleagues set up a marriage and sexual counseling center in Berlin in 1930 , where the use of pessaries was also instructed. The educational booklet he wrote, The Book of Marriage. Wegweiser für men and women was attacked for religious, moral and demographic reasons, including by the German medical profession. Sanger, who wanted to spread Lehfeldt's writing in the United States, failed there due to censorship.

While Graefenberg was still under illusions after the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933 and stayed in Germany - and was only able to emigrate at the last minute in 1940 after a stay in prison with Sanger's support - Lehfeldt was forced to go to the United States in 1934. He was able to work there again from 1935 and was successful as a doctor of the upper middle class with a practice for gynecology and obstetrics in New York's Park Avenue , which he ran until 1991. From 1936 to 1947 he also worked at the "School of Medicine" at New York University , and in 1958 he took over the family planning clinic at Bellevue Hospital Center . New York University named him a Clinical Professor in 1969 . Lehfeldt helped to ensure that the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973 .

In 1957, Lehfeldt was one of the founders of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex with Hugo G. Beigel , Harry Benjamin and Albert Ellis , to which Henry Guze and Robert Veit Sherwin (-1979) also belonged. He chaired its first congress in 1958 and was its president from 1962 to 1964.

Fonts (selection)

  • The book of marriage. Signpost f. Men u. Women , Berlin: Aufklärungs-Bücherei-Verl., [Around 1930].
  • 11 cases of parathyphous colitis in infancy and early childhood , o. O., 1923, Med. Diss. Univ. Berlin.
  • Bibliography of the essays and conference papers in Sigusch, Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung , p. 406f.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ World League for Sexual Reform at DNB
  2. ^ Bellevue Hospital Center in the English language Wikipedia : Bellevue Hospital Center
  3. ^ Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality at DNB
personal data
SURNAME Lehfeldt, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American medic
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1993
Place of death New York City