Chaim Sheba

Chaim Sheba (1908, Frasin, near Gura Humora, Romania&mdash;1971) was an Israeli physician.

Born to the well known Scheiber Hasidic family, in 1929, he ended his medical studies in Vienna and made aliyah in 1933. Until 1936, he served as rural doctor and later in Beilinson Hospital. From 1948 to 1951, he was the Surgeon General to the Israel Defense Forces and later became Director General of the Ministry of Health.

Later, Chaim Sheba became head of the Beilinson Hospital and the Tel HaShomer Hospital. In 1968, he won the Israel Prize.

The Chaim Sheba Medical Center is named in his honor.

The ringworm children
In the years following the Second World War, tens of thousands of Israeli children (especially immigrants from abroad) were given radiation treatment as a cure for ringworm. The treatments involved X-ray exposure 35,000 stronger than the maximum recommended dose, and resulted in large increases in cancer cases amongst people treated. Radiation exposure was a not-uncommon method of treating the disease before the war, when comparatively little was known about the effects of radiation, but after the war, one would have expected the recent examples of the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs to have been taken into account by medical staff. Victims of this treatment may be known as "the ringworm children".

Epidemiology showed as early as the 1960s that Israeli ringworm patients were more likely to suffer from cancer, which prompted the investigations that revealed this treatment as the cause. The Israeli government has admitted responsibility and provided compensation for surviving victims.

Claims have been made that this was intended as an experiment in the effects of radiation on the human body, for which the American government paid significant sums to Israel. It is also claimed that Sephardi Jews were singled out as victims of this treatment, in a planned programme of eugenics by the Israeli government (who were predominantly Ashkenazi Jews). As the Director General of the Israeli Health Ministry at the time, it is assumed that Chaim Sheba would have had a significant role in this. Medical records from the time no longer exist and most government ministers of the time are no longer alive, so it is possible that these claims may never be conclusively proved or disproved.