An American contribution to German anesthesia.

Jean Emily Henley (1910–1994) was the only child of Eugene and Esther Heller, who emigrated to the United States from Germany and Hungary, respectively.‡ Their native language was German, which probably explains their daughter’s fluency in that language. While Jean was still a child, her father changed the family name to Henley. She was born and educated in Chicago, Illinois, and in September 1929 she entered Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. She left the following March to study sculpture for 3 years in Paris, France (personal communication, Marilyn Kritchman, M.D., Retired, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York, New York) and then completed her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, Manhattan, New York.§ Remaining in New York City, New York, she obtained her medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York, in 1940. After an internship in California (fig. 1), she trained in Internal Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, from 1942 to 1944. Immediately after completing her training, she volunteered for and was accepted by the United States Army Medical Corps, practicing Internal Medicine in the military in the U.S. mainland and in Korea for the next 26 months.# On March 1, 1947, she returned to civilian practice, entering the anesthesiology residency training program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York, New York. By the time she graduated from the program in 1949, Prof. Emanuel Papper, Professor Emeritus and Former Dean, University of Miami Medical School, Miami, Florida, had taken over leadership of the department from Prof. Virginia Apgar, Professor of Anesthesia, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, Manhattan, New York. Prof. Papper invited Dr. Henley to become Chief of Anesthesia at the Francis Delafield Hospital, which was the cancer hospital attached to Columbia. However, instead of accepting this, she decided to travel to Switzerland, and from there to Germany. A description of what followed next is found in the text of a talk that Dr. Henley gave 30 years later, at the Seventh World Congress of Anesthesiologists in Hamburg, Germany, in 1980. She had been invited to speak by Dr. Rudolf Frey, Professor of Anesthesia, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany, one of the leading anesthesiologists in Germany at that time (fig. 2). Dr. Henley stated that her visit to Germany in 1949 had begun quite by chance and was entirely unofficial. She had been invited by Dr. Maria Daelen, from the Public Health Department of Hessen, Wiesbaden, Germany, whom she had met during a visit by Dr. Daelen to New York. When Maria Daelen heard that Jean Henley was planning a trip to Europe in the spring of 1949, she asked her to come to Germany for a few days, saying that anesthesia had not progressed as in other countries during the war because of governmental interruption of contact with the outside world. This invitation set the stage for Jean Henley’s subsequent activities.