“An all-forgiving nature”: The three lives of pharmacist Kurt Rawski-Conroy (1890-1976)

In 1963 Kurt Rawski-Conroy, then a hospital pharmacist in England, celebrated the fi ftieth anniversary of his university degree and sent a gift to his friends in Vienna. It was a “three-photo tableau showing him in three phases of his life.”1 Even though we were not able to locate that tableau, it is a striking symbol of a life characterized by two massive breaks. Born in 1890 as Konrad Rawski in Galicia (then part of the Habsburg Empire) he joined the army as a military pharmacist – a career that ended after the collapse of the Danube Monarchy. He then worked in the pharmaceutical industry and in community pharmacy, but the annexation of Austria by the National Socialist German Reich forced him to fl ee the country. He fi nally built up a new life as a hospital pharmacist in England. In doing so, he always stayed connected to Austria – apparently with no grief – and enabled the transfer of pharmaceutical knowledge between the United Kingdom and the German-speaking world.