Jean Emily Henley

Jean Emily Henley (born December 3, 1910 in Chicago , Illinois , † August 19, 1994 in Shelburne Vermont ) was an anesthetist.

She was the only child of Eugene Henry Heller, from Hungary, and Helen Esther Goodman from Germany, who emigrated to the USA. There the father changed the name to Henley.

After Jean Henley received her Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College and Barnard College , she went to Paris in the early 1930s to study sculpture. She then studied medicine in New York and graduated from Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons in 1940 . After completing further training in internal medicine, she volunteered in the army in 1944. On March 1, 1947, she began her training as an anesthetist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, which she graduated in 1949. Then she went to Switzerland and there accepted an invitation from Maria Daelen from Wiesbaden to come to Germany. Originally she only wanted to visit Germany for a few days (her visa was only valid for ten days), but she stayed for two years as a visiting doctor in Gießen, Frankfurt, Marburg, Wiesbaden, Tübingen, Berlin, Heidenheim, Hamburg and Heidelberg . She used anesthesia machines from the US Army but also developed her own anesthesia machines. In 1950 she wrote the first modern anesthesia textbook after 1945 in Germany: "Introduction to the Practice of Modern Inhalation Anesthesia" published by de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin. This textbook had thirteen editions by 1991 and a total circulation of more than 15,000 copies. She developed standards that are still important in anesthesiology today. Upon her return to the United States, she became Chief Medical Officer and Associate Professor at Delafield Francis Hospital in New York. She held these positions until her retirement in 1972. In 1981 she was made an honorary member of the German Society for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (DGAI). She died on August 19, 1994 in Shelburne, Vermont.

literature

Heike Petermann: Anglo-American influences on the establishment of anesthesia in the Federal Republic of Germany in the period from 1949 to 1960 . In: Anästhesiol Intensivmed Emergency Med Schmerzther . 40, pp. 133-41. doi : 10.1055 / s-2004-826137 . PMID 15770556 .