Samuel Sarphati
Samuel Sarphati · Science & Medicine
Médecin et réformateur d'Amsterdam : hygiène urbaine, boulangerie populaire, Palais de l'Industrie, Amstel Hotel
31 janvier 1813 — 23 juin 1866
Amsterdam (Pays-Bas) — mort à Amsterdam
Samuel Sarphati is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Médecin et réformateur d'Amsterdam : hygiène urbaine, boulangerie populaire, Palais de l'Industrie, Amstel Hotel
Origins and early life
Samuel Sarphati was born in Amsterdam on 31 January 1813 into a Portuguese Sephardi family settled in the Netherlands since the seventeenth century, his father a tobacco merchant, and he remained a practising Jew: he began his career as the salaried physician of the Portuguese Jewish community, appointed in January 1840 at the Snoge to treat the poor of the Meshiev Nefesh hospital, and he married Abigaël Mendes de Leon, daughter of a former parnas, in a religious ceremony in 1843.
Work and career
Practising among the poorest quarters of a city then notorious for its filth and its cholera, he concluded that medicine alone could not reach the causes of what he saw, and he turned to the city itself. He founded a company to collect Amsterdam's refuse and turn it into fertiliser for the surrounding polders, a scheme that cleaned the streets and paid for itself. He created a bread factory to sell good bread cheaply and break the grip of the bakers' cartel on the poor, a trade school and a business school, a mortgage bank and a credit institution to finance building.
Later years
He organised the Palace of National Industry of 1864 on the model of the Crystal Palace, built the Amstel Hotel, and drew up the plan for the southward expansion of Amsterdam that the city largely followed after his death. He died in Amsterdam on 23 June 1866, aged fifty-three, and a park, a street and a monument in the city bear his name.
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Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/samuel-sarphati
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Médecin et réformateur d'Amsterdam : hygiène urbaine, boulangerie populaire, Palais de l'Industrie, Amstel Hotel
Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/samuel-sarphati
