Rosenblatt, Wilhelm F., 1913-2004

Wilhelm F. Rosenblatt, M.D.

Wilhelm Friedrich Rosenblatt (1913-2004) was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1913. Although his father and an uncle were physicians, it was not until late in his high school years that Dr. Rosenblatt thought of becoming a doctor. He received his medical degree at the University of Leipzig in 1936. In 1937, Dr. Rosenblatt passed the state boards and then completed a one year internship. However, he was not allowed to get a medical license because he was half Jewish and Germany was in the throes of Nazism. He spent a year in the German Luftwaffe, but was dismissed for being Jewish. For the next four years, he tutored medical students privately until he was incarcerated in a German forced-labor camp, part of Organisation Todt, where he was a physician for foreign laborers. In 1945, Dr. Rosenblatt became a prisoner of war of the United States Army in France. In March, 1946, he was repatriated and went to Marburg an der Lahn, West Germany to enter an internal medicine residency. After three years he became a specialist according to German regulations and began working for the German Veterans' Administration as an internist. Dr. Rosenblatt emigrated to the United States in 1953.

After arriving in the United States with his oldest daughter, Dr. Rosenblatt first took a job as staff physician at a hospital in Ossining, New York. He sent for his other three children and his wife and took a new position at the Hopemont Sanatorium, a state tuberculosis sanatorium in West Virginia, where he would receive room and board. After five years, he moved to Decatur, Alabama to another state TB sanatorium. While on vacation in the western United States, Dr. Rosenblatt, with the encouragement of his children, visited the New Mexico State Health Department to check for job openings. In 1966, having received his institutional license to practice in New Mexico, he settled his family in Fort Stanton, where he had been appointed an attending physician with the Department of Hospitals and Institutions at Fort Stanton Tuberculosis Sanatorium. When the Fort Stanton sanatorium was closed in 1966, Dr. Rosenblatt became medical director of Fort Bayard Tuberculosis Hospital (New Mexico). He transferred to Albuquerque, and later to Santa Fe, as chief of the Chronic Disease Control Bureau of the Public Health Division of the New Mexico Department of Health. Dr. Rosenblatt retired in 1983 after fifteen years working with various state departments and moved to Corrales, New Mexico.

After retirement, Dr. Rosenblatt continued to be involved with tuberculosis and public health by becoming an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and as an advocate for public health improvement and universal access to free, quality medical care. He also was an active member of the United States-Mexico Border Health Association and the Physicians for Social Responsibility. Dr. Rosenblatt died in 2004.

From the guide to the Wilhelm F. Rosenblatt Oral History Collection, 1991, (New Mexico Health Historical Collection, UNM Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center.)