Stephen William Kuffler (1913–1980)

Excerpt

Stephen William Kuffler was born on August 24, 1913 in the small town of Tap, Hungary, to a family of landowners belonging to the reformed Calvinist church. Under the short communist regime of Béla Kun (1886–1939), in 1919, the family had to flee Hungary and seek refuge in Austria. Four years later, Kuffler was sent to a Jesuit boarding school in Kalksburg near Vienna to receive a formal education for the first time in his life. The teaching offered at this school, however, was largely humanistic with “practically no science” in the curriculum (Kuffler ca. 1971). Once he graduated from Gymnasium high school in 1932, Kuffler began his medical studies in the Habsburg capital. During and after his medical education, he held positions as a research assistant and associate at several Vienna hospitals and travelled to Egypt and England; while working as a medical clerk in London for some months Kuffler learned English. Despite these prolonged trips he did not require much longer than 5 years to complete medical school. After receiving his M.D. in 1937, he began a residency in internal medicine and simultaneously worked in the Pathology Department in Vienna [3, 4] (Fig. 1).

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