NEWLY qualified doctors of the 1920s and 1930s sought practical experience as housemen in hospitals. A position of this kind, which usually lasted for six months or a year, was the standard first step in a doctor's career, although as yet it was not compulsory. However, even the top students, if they were the children of east European Jewish immigrants, sometimes found it difficult to obtain these positions in the London teaching hospitals or such institutions as the Manchester Royal Infirmary during the 1920s, though it became slightly easier in the following decade. The general practitioner and communal leader Dr Bernard Homa claimed that in order to fill one of these positions at Bart's, it was necessary to have passed the primary FRCS exam—or to be a member of the hospital rugby team. He ended up in 1923 as house physician at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading; Solomon Wand, despite graduating in 1921 with distinction in medicine, could find no vacancy for a houseman in the Manchester teaching hospitals because of the prejudice against Jews and instead became house surgeon to Dr Robinson at the local infirmary in Warrington. On the other hand, Dr Louise Aronovich (b. 1885), whose father had been a prosperous cotton merchant, was in 1926 made a clinical assistant at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, where she was treated ‘as one of themselves’.

In 1937 the Education Aid Society reported that ‘All medical students [assisted by the society] recently qualified have obtained positions and four of them secured House Appointments in London Hospitals.’ One of these students, who filled the position of house physician at University College Hospital, was Simon Yudkin; others who secured such appointments at the same hospital were Moss Albert and Kalman Mann. Yet Jewish students completing their medical training in Leeds and other provincial towns found difficulties in obtaining employment. In Leeds in 1922 the local board of guardians chose a Catholic doctor as medical officer for a certain district, although the Jewish contender Dr Morris Shernovitch was better qualified and had satisfactorily performed his duties as deputy, on grounds that non-Jewish women would not want to be examined by a Jewish doctor.