Even in ancient times, Jews were often associated with the practice of medicine, an association that persists in both the popular imagination and in reality to this day. Edward Reichman tells the story of the first European medical school to accept Jewish students, and their battles against the plague that swept through the continent in the 17th century:
The university of Padua was the first officially to open its doors to non-Catholics, including both Protestants and Jews. Other Italian universities accepted Jews during this period as well, though papal permission was usually required. Thus, it was primarily in Italy, and particularly in Padua, that the majority of Jewish physicians of the Renaissance trained.
By the early 1600s a steady stream of Jewish students [from both] local Italian communities [and] from abroad availed themselves of this unique opportunity. . . . Their special status as physicians often exempted them from wearing the required Jewish garb. [Yet] Jewish physicians were largely confined by law to treating their fellow Jews. Only on rare occasions could one obtain special papal dispensation to treat non-Jewish patients as well.
Reichman zeroes in on four Jewish graduates of the Padua medical school whose careers, fortuitously well documented, placed them on the frontlines of the battle against the plague that struck Italy in 1631. Among them was one Clemente Caliman Kalonymus Cantarini, born in 1593 into a distinguished Paduan Jewish family:
[O]n July 8, 1631 Caliman’s father Shimon died from plague, to be followed by his uncle Menaḥem on July 22. Caliman himself would succumb to the disease only eight days later. He died on July 30, 1631, at age thirty-eight. His life and death are memorialized in the plague diary of Abraham Catalano, [himself a physician and one of the heads of Padua’s Jewish community]. Other Cantarini family members are also accounted for in the diary. Caliman lost two other brothers to the plague. . . . Three of Caliman’s brothers in Padua survived, and one . . . was in Venice during the outbreak and unaffected.
Caliman battled the plague, sacrificing his life in the process leaving no direct descendants.
Read more on Lehrhaus: https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/from-graduation-to-contagion-jewish-physicians-confront-plague-in-1631/