Łucja Frey-Gottesman (1889-1942?),
Łucja Frey portrait. Published for first time in: Herman: Neuolodzy polscy Warszawa 1958, without any copyright notice (photograph taken in 1919, photographer unknown).
Łucja Frey-Gottesman was born in a Jewish family on November 3, 1889 in lamberg which at that time was part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire (from 1918 to 1939 Lwów belonged to Second Polish Republic, now Lviv in Ukraine). She was the daughter of Szymon Symcha Frey, a construction supplier, and Dina Weinreb[1]. The Frey family belonged to the assimilated Jews of Lviv; Łucja indicated Polish as her native language[1,2,3,4].
In the years 1896–1900 she attended a Catholic primary school at the Benedictine monastery, then the Goldblatt-Kammerling Jewish junior high school for girls (from 1900 to 1907). On November 10, 1907, she passed her secondary school exams as an external student at the Franz Józefa Junior High School [4]. Her parents' connections enabled her to continue her education despite the difficulties that at that time limited women's rights to study. In 1908 she began studying philosophy at the University of Lviv, but eventually she changed her major to mathematics. After passing her license teaching exams in 1913 she took a position as a secondary school teacher in mathematics [4].
Four years later, at the age of 28 she began medical studies in Lviv. Unfortunately, after four semeters of studies in Lviv, the Polish-Ukrainian war interrupted her medical education for one academic year between 1918/1919. She resumed her medical education in Warsaw and before graduating, she was employed as a junior assistant at the neurological clinic of Kazimierz Orzechowski, the first director of the Department of Nervous Diseases of the University of Warsaw [5]. She graduated on February 20, 1921. From June 1922 to May 1923 she passed a number of final exams, including an exam in neurology with prof. Orzechowski receiving an excellent grade[1]. She received her diploma at the age of 34, on June 23, 1923 with special recognition for her outstanding expertise in neurology, pathology, and anatomy [4].
In the years 1923–28 she was a senior assistant at the neurological clinic in Warsaw. She probably defended her Ph.D. dissertation in 1924 since her further publications were designated with the Ph.D. degree. However, this is only a speculation since no doctoral dissertation is to be found among Łucja Frey's works and no information about such work is provided in the lists of pre-war dissertations at the University of Warsaw[6]. Therefore, it seems likely that the title "Dr med." used by Herman[7] means "doctor of general medical sciences", i.e. a doctor, and not the academic title of "doctor of medicine"[4].
During her stay in Warsaw, she lived in the clinic building at ul. Nowogrodzka 59. In 1929 she returned to Lviv to work as a neurologist at the Jewish Community Hospital and married a lawyer Marek (Mordechaj) Gottesman, the father of her children Jakub and Danuta [4].
Jewish hospital in Lwów in 1930s, in which Łucja Frey worked from 1929
In 1930, she gave birth to a daughter, Danuta [1]. In 1932, the Frey family moved to a new apartment at ul. Sykstuska 35. Information about the second child, Jakub, born in 1919, comes from only one source - the testimony of Łucja Frey's sister-in-law, Hedwa Balat née Gottesman, submitted to the Yad Vashem institute in 1955[4].
In 1940 her husband was arrested by Soviet intelligence agencies (NKVD), charged with counterrevolutionary activity and he was never seen again. After the Germans occupied the city, Łucja Frey was forced to live in the ghetto [1]. There she worked at the Second Clinic (II. Ghettopoliklinik) at ul. Zamarstynowska 112[2,4]. The last evidence that Łucja Frey was alive comes from April 1, 1942. It is a completed personal questionnaire for a work permit card (Fragebogen zur erstmaligen Meldung der Heilberufe) with serial number 144, issued by the German authorities. At that time she lived at Balonowa 6 m. 12. On August 20, 1942, almost all patients and medical staff of the clinic in the ghetto (at least 400 people) were murdered[1]. The circumstances of Łucja's death in 1942 or 1943 remain unclear [8,9]. It is uncertain whether Łucja Frey died or was deported between August 10 and 22 to the German extermination camp in Bełżec and then died there in 1944 [1,6]. Probably, if she survived longer, her life would have ended with the liquidation of the Lwów ghetto by departing Schutzstaffel units in June 1943. Moreover, nothing is known about the fate of Łucja Frey's family, her daughter Danuta, alleged son Jakub, husband, parents and parents-in-law[4].
Reproduction of a permit dated April 1, 1942, authorizing Łucja Frey to work as a physician in the Lwów ghetto. This document is now conserved at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (Record Group 2002.34, “Łucja Frey Gottesman collection”). Public domain. Figure is available in color online only.
Ghetto in Lwów 1942
The first article in memory of Łucja Frey written by Eufemiusz Herman was published in "Neurologia Polska" in 1950 [10]. Eufemiusz Herman wrote about her[7]:
“Extremely modest, quiet, hard-working, highly creative. All her scientific works are characterized by extraordinary accuracy, striving for comprehensive knowledge of the examined issue and serious knowledge of the subject [...] Although the scientific legacy of Łucja Frey is not very great, each of her published works has a great scientific weight, leaving a lasting contribution to the world's scientific achievements.”
In 1958 in the monograph Polish Neurologists a whole chapter was devoted to Łucja Frey's live and scientific legacy [7]. In the last twenty years, a number of articles describing Łucja Frey' achievements have been published in neurological and otorhinolaryngological journals[3,4,11,,12,13,14,15]. Despite this, Frey's name is often omitted or misspelled, even in specialized publications ("Lucy"[16,17] or "Lucie"[18]). In some publications the years of life of the Austrian physician and physiologist Maximilian Ruppert Franz von Frey are wrongly given as the dates of her birth and death[18].
Łucja Frey source: Bennet J Frey’s syndrome – the untold story. Journal of Medical Biography 1993, 1, 125-127
Much information is missing about the fate of Łucja Frey and her family members, however, she left a huge legacy in the world of science and medicine.
She was an author of 43 scientific papers in which she carefully described multiple neurological problems. In 1923 in Frey's "Polska Gazeta Lekarska” [19] and in French in "Revue Neurologique” [20] she published her most known work on the auriculotemporal nerve syndrome. It was a case of a 15-year-old tennis player who was wounded at the end of 1920 by a rifle bullet outside the angle of the mandible on the left side. Even though the wound was superficial, the patient lost consciousness immediately after the injury, so he does not know when he was brought to the hospital. After regaining consciousness, he noticed that the entire left half of his face was severely swollen. After a week he contracted typhoid fever, and four weeks later he contracted typhus. The patient then started complaining about the following manifestations: redness of the left side of his face, and a feeling of warmth and sweating in this area while he was eating. The patient was ashamed to eat meals in public places stating that “people think that I ate so voraciously”. Łucja Frey carried out pharmacological provocation tests, and became convinced that the injection of 1 mg of atropine caused a significant dryness of the mouth, a lack of redness of the skin of the lower mandible, and it eliminated the sweating. Paleness and a reduction of warmth of the left side of the face was caused by hypodermic injection of 1 mg of Physostigmine. Although it was not the first description of this symptom complex in the literature[8,15] Frey was the first to recognize the syndrome as a disorder affecting both sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve fibers and described its patomechanism [13]. Today it is well known as Łucja Frey’s syndrome (in polish literature) and as Frey's syndrome (in English publications).
In the nowadays literature Frey’s syndrome (sometimes called also as auriclo-temporal syn-drome, gustatory sweating, Baillarger’s syndrome, Frey–Baillarger syndrome, or Dupuy’s syndrome[21]) is described with the symptoms of transient sweating (typical for males), warmth, and redness (mostly shown in females) in the buccal region of the face when the patient smells, eats, or even talks about food. Most often, it involves only one side of the face, but rarely also both sides can be affected (Johnson and Birchall, 1995).
Publication, in which the Frey’s syndrome has been described Journal “Polska Gazeta Lekarska” 1923, 41, 708-710
In addition to this most important work, Frey has published on the effects of plant poisons on spinal cord degeneration[22], topographic anatomy of the brainstem[23,24], amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Charcot's disease)[9,25], and cases of casuistic spinal vascular malformations spinal cord[26,27], third ventricle cysts[28], slope tumors[29], frontal lobe tumors, and retrosplenial tumors (located posteriorly to the splenium of the corpus callosum)[30,31]. In most of the publications she is the only author. Four articles she have wrote with Professor Orzechowski, and one, devoted to hereditary diseases of the nervous system, with neuropathologist Opalski[32]. Moreover, her description of synchronous spinal vascular malformations was the first in the world literature[33]. Łucja Frey offered the first observation of a synchronous double spinal vascular malformation and, to this day, the only one associating a spinal arteriovenous malformation (AVM) with a perimedullary arteriovenous fistula (AVF) [33].
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