Fonds 1686 - Aron M. Rappaport fonds

Professor, research scientist and a specialist in diseases of the liver.

A pioneer in liver research, Rappaport was born in 1904 in Siret, Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He obtained a medical degree from the German University of Prague in 1929 and trained as a surgeon in Germany and France. During the Second World War, he practiced surgery in Romania.

In 1948 he emigrated to Canada where he worked with Professor Charles Best as a research assistant. Rappaport’s work in experimental cardiovascular surgery led to a study of the liver’s circulation systems and a PhD in physiology which he completed in 1952. Soon after, he was hired as a lecturer in physiology and became a professor in 1955.

Rappaport is credited with the development of several experimental methods and theories leading to discoveries in the structure; microcirculation and angiography of the liver. In the early 1970s he produced two films on hepatic circulation systems which are now used at more than 400 medical schools around the world. Rappaport retired in 1972. In 1979 he became a senior research scientist with the Sunnybrook Hospital, now the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. In 1990, the centre named its microcirculation research laboratory after him. He died in Toronto on 9 March 1992.