WITH the advent of the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933, the harassment of Jewish professionals intensified and there began an exodus of Jewish doctors from Germany, which accelerated when laws were passed to exclude Jews from the German medical service. In May 1934 non-Aryan physicians were debarred from participating in the state health insurance scheme; from April 1937 Jews were no longer entitled to take exams to qualify as doctors; and from 30 September 1938 all Jewish medical licences were to be revoked, even if in certain cases Jews were to be permitted to provide medical treatment for other Jews. Already by the end of 1933 578 doctors had left the Reich, and by mid-1934 1,100 had fled abroad. There were also 311 persons dismissed from medical research institutes in the mid-1930s because they were Jewish or partly Jewish. Robert N. Proctor has quoted a source which suggested that by December 1936 4,000 of Germany's 7,500 Jewish physicians had emigrated, but another source estimated that these figures were not reached until the middle of 1938. It is possible, too, that Proctor's figure for the number of Jewish physicians in Germany may be too low, as the highly influential Dr W. M. Kotschnig, an official of the High Commission for Refugees, put the total number of Jewish and non-Aryan doctors in Germany in 1934 at 9,000; and Paul Weindling has suggested that of Vienna's 4,900 doctors, some 3,200, or 60 per cent, were Jewish.

A report of the academic registrar of London University prepared in April 1933 pointed out that

The unqualified medical students, even those ‘within six months of their final qualification’, would have to take the ordinary British students’ courses, studying from three to five years. There was already a ‘limitation of entry … enforced in the London Medical Schools on two classes of British subjects, namely women students and students of non-European parentage’.