Lazar Margulies

Origins and early life

Lazar Margulies was born in 1895 in Galicia, then a province of Austria-Hungary and later part of Poland, and served in the medical corps of the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War.

Work and career

He completed his medical studies at the University of Vienna in 1921 and trained as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, practising in Vienna from 1929 until 1938. As Nazi rule spread he was arrested because he was Jewish and held in Buchenwald as a political prisoner, and he was released on 28 April 1939 once his family had made plans to emigrate to Britain. He reached Britain in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1941 and settled in New York City, where he joined the Mount Sinai Hospital in 1954.

In 1958, while working in its department of obstetrics, he proposed to the head of the department, Alan Guttmacher, a safer intrauterine device made of plastic, and Guttmacher let him run the clinical trials. The device he developed in 1960 was a spiral of thermoplastic that was straightened inside a thin tube, pushed into the uterus with a plastic plunger and then took back its shape, so that the cervix no longer had to be dilated.

He filed his first patent application on 8 November 1960 and presented his clinical results at the first international symposium on intrauterine devices, held in New York in 1962. The patent for his coil spring device was granted on 17 August 1965 and assigned to the research foundation of Mount Sinai, and his method solved many of the problems of the earlier metal devices. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Manhattan in 1982, having carried his work on safer contraception from Vienna to New York.