Karolina Jus

Karolina Frist Jus, (31 December 1914 – 22 November 2002) was a Polish-Canadian neurologist of Jewish origin; her parents and only sibling were killed in the Holocaust. She was a pioneer of electroencephalographic research and the effect of psychotropic drugs on sleep.

Biography Karolina Frist was born on 31 December 1914 in Vienna after her father, Dr. Juliusz Frist, sent his pregnant wife, Dorota Bannet, there when invading Russian troops threatened their hometown of Kraków, Poland. Her parents were part of an extended Jewish family from that city. She was the granddaughter of Henryk Frist (founder of the Salon of Polish Painters in Kraków). Karolina and her sister Zofia (born 1917) were raised in a family of Jewish faith, although they were assimilated and felt Polish.

In Kraków, Karolina passed her secondary school examination in 1932, and went on to study law at the Faculty of Law of the Jagiellonian University, graduating in 1936 with a Master of Law degree. She also studied at the London School of Economics. In 1937, she defended her doctoral thesis on the Statute of Westminster 1931. That same year, she began studying medicine at the Jagiellonian University Medical College in Kraków.

World War II After the outbreak of World War II, she and her parents traveled by train to Lviv (now in Ukraine), which was under Soviet occupation at the end of 1939. She attended medical classes at the Lviv Medical Institute and was accepted into the third-year of studies there. When she attended a meeting about research on convulsive therapy in October 1940, she met Andrzej Karol Jus, a Catholic doctor from the Psychiatric Institution. At the beginning of 1942, the couple left Lviv and settled in Dydnia, Poland. However, her remaining Jewish family members were not so lucky. In April 1942, her parents and sister were murdered by German Nazis and buried in a mass grave. They organized a research and scientific laboratory focused on electroencephalography, clinical neurophysiology, and sleep research.

Karolina Jus defended her doctorate in medicine at the University of Warsaw in 1946. But the political atmosphere in Poland had become very anti-Semitic and threatened both Karolina and Andrzej personally and professionally.

Selected works The diagnostic value of single-lead electroencephalography in epilepsy (1949) Fighting the Idealistic Offensive in Electroencephalography (1953) Pavlov and His Teachings (1953, 1955) Electroencephalography (1954) Clinical electroencephalography (1967) Biological methods of treatment in psychiatry (1969)