Background
Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, he was a son of the noted chemist and industrialist Benno Jaffé.
Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, he was a son of the noted chemist and industrialist Benno Jaffé.
He studied medicine in Berlin, Munich and Freiburg, and after graduating as a physician, he worked at the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg (1909–1910) and as a ship"s doctor in East Asia.
He became an assistant professor in bacteriology in Giessen in 1911 and joined the Senckenberg Institute of Pathology in Frankfurt in 1912, as an assistant of Bernhard Fischer-Wasels. During the First World War, he served as a military physician in Galicia and Romania and then became an army pathologist in Vilnius. In 1919 he earned his Habilitation at the Goethe University Frankfurt and was appointed as an associate professor
He became director of the Pathological-Bacteriological Institute in Berlin-Moabit in 1926, a position he held until he was forced to retire by the Nazis in 1934.
In 1936 he emigrated to Venezuela, where he became the founding director of the Institute of Pathology at the Vargas Hospital in Caracas, which he based on the German model. After the Second World War, he resumed his contact with Germany and had extensive cooperation with German scientists, and was a regular contributor to the activities of the German Society for Pathology.
He retired in 1953. Prior to 1934, his research notably focused on lipids in the endocrine gland.
In Venezuela he focused on infectious diseases such as schistosomiasis and syphilis. There is also a memorial plaque outside the Moabit Hospital in Berlin.
