Ingeborg Rapoport: a pioneer in perinatal medicine

Professor Ingeborg Rapoport (second from left) 1985
Bundesarchiv CC BY-SA 3.0

The third season of Charité takes place in 1961 during erection of the Berlin Wall. Several of the characters are based on real life persons the most striking being the pediatrician Dr Ingeborg Rapoport. She later became the first Professor of Neonatology in Germany. Indeed one of the central themes in the television series is the conflict between pediatrics and obstetrics about care of the newborn. Obstetrics is here represented by Professor Helmut Kraatz.

Ingeborg Syllm was born in German West Africa (Cameroon) in 1912. She was raised as a protestant yet denied completion of her medical degree when the NSDAP came to power because her mother, a concert pianist, was Jewish. In 1938 she moved to the United States where she completed her medical education and specialised in pediatrics. In 1944 she married Samuel Mitja Rapoport a physiological chemist who had left Austria after the Anschluss. They were to raise four children.

Both the Rapoports were members of the Communist Party and had to flee again in the 1950's when under investigation for un-American activities. They finally settled in Berlin and remained in the DDR after the wall was built.

Ingeborg Rapoports autobiography

In 1969, just before the retirement of Kraatz, Ingeborg Rapoport was elected to the first Chair of Neonatology in Germany. She herself retired in 1973 but remained active, publishing her autobiography Meine ersten drei Leben (My First Three Lives) in 1997.

In 2015, when the University of Hamburg offered her an honorary doctorate in lieu of that denied her in 1937, she asked instead leave to defend her thesis and passed the oral examination with magnum cum laude. Ingeborg Rapoport was then 102 years old. She lived to be 104.