Mayer Cahen

Origins and early life

Mayer Cahen was born in Paris on 21 January 1823, son of the physician Moïse Cahen, president of the Israelite Consistory of Paris, and of the philanthropist Coralie Cahen, who founded the refuge for Jewish children; his sister Rosine became a photographer under the name Madame Moriss.

Work and career

He entered the competitive internship of the Paris hospitals in 1842 and became chief physician of the Rothschild hospital, the institution the family had endowed so that the Jewish poor of the eastern arrondissements could be treated without asking anything of anyone. He was at the same time chief medical officer of the Compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord, one of the great industrial employers of the century, responsible for the health of thousands of railwaymen at a period when industrial medicine was being invented in the process of being needed.

Three generations of the same household therefore ran, in turn, the Consistory, the children's refuge and the hospital. He died young, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris on 16 October 1866, at forty-three, ten years after his father and long before his mother.