A common ‘jewish invention’ claim is the blithe assertion that a jew ‘invented the vaccination needle’ with Kathyrn Bernheimer at ‘Boulder Jewish News’ being a prime example. (1) Some other jews – like Pam Karp – (2) are more specific and state that the ‘vaccination needle for smallpox’ was developed by a jew named Benjamin Rubin.
The truth about these claims is however not hard to unpick if you think about it, because vaccinations were routinely given using needle-based injections from the mid-nineteenth century onwards with the Irishman Francis Rynd developing the first hollow needle in 1844 (3) and Scottish doctor Alexander Wood added the glass syringe and plunger in 1853 to make the first hypodermic syringe (4) – that was almost simultaneously independently invented by the French doctor Charles Pravaz in the same year - which soon after began to be used to vaccinate patients rather than using a purpose-made cut as previously. (5)
In time the use of hypodermic syringes for mass vaccination was abandoned in favour of the quicker multi-use ‘Jet Injector’ originally invented by Arnold Sutermeister in the United States in 1935 and improved as well as patented by Marshall Lockhart in 1936 as the ‘Hypospray’ which was introduced to medicine in 1947 and began to see wide use from the 1950s onwards.
However, the problem with the ‘Jet Injector’ was that it was complex and heavy to use so in 1961 Benjamin Rubin – who was indeed jewish – and Gus Chakros (who wasn’t) invented the bifurcated needle specifically to help smallpox vaccinations. (6)
Note that most jewish accounts of the invented of the bifurcated needle simply leave out the role of Chakros and purely credit it to Rubin which is simply not accurate.
Now what this means is that jews certainly didn’t develop the vaccinating needle as Kathyrn Bernheimer claims as that was Francis Rynd, Alexander Wood and Charles Pravaz in mid nineteenth century, but if we were to say that the bifurcated needle was a jewish invention this is only half right in that jews only receive credit for half given that Rubin had a non-jewish co-inventor: Gus Chakros!
References
(1) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(2) https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388
(3) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-55676034
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Benjamin Tucker, 2001, ‘Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox’, 1st Edition, Grove Press: New York, p. 72