Lasar Dünner grew up in a Jewish merchant family in Cologne.1 He first studied dentistry in Würzburg. After passing the dental exam in 1907, he studied human medicine in Munich and Berlin and was licensed in 1911. In the same year he was appointed assistant at the I. Medical Department of the Moabit Hospital in Berlin under Georg Klemperer. He was temporarily enlisted in the Reichswehr during World War I.2
Lung Research in Berlin
He was appointed senior physician in the II Internal Department of Moabit Hospital under Wilhelm Martin Zinn and Klemperer in 1921. He had previously succeeded in radiographic imaging of the pulmonary vessels using sodium iodid as a contrast agent.3 Klemperer held Dünner in high esteem and frequently published together with him.4After having briefly worked as a physician in private practice,5Dünner was appointed chief physician of the newly founded Städtisches Hospital Buch-West in Berlin in 1929.6 In addition to his clinical work, he was involved as a tuberculosis welfare physician.7
Escape to England
The National Socialists prevented him from entering his clinic from the summer of 1933. He was dismissed along with his Jewish colleagues.8 Subsequently, he served as chief physician of the internal medicine department at the Hospital of the Jewish Community in Berlin. After the licenses to practice medicine had been revoked for all Jewish physicians in September 1938, Dünner fled to England in early 1939. After obtaining a work permit there in 1941, he headed an Industrial Chest Diseases Clinic in Hull.9
After 1945, he returned to Germany for conferences and meetings. For example, he participated in the "3. Internationale Staublungen-Tagung" (3rd International Conference on Pneumoconiosis), organized by Karl Wilhelm Jötten in Münster in October 1957.10
Lasar Dünner died before his 74th birthday while on vacation in the Neckar Valley.11
Dünner was a specialist in pulmonology and, together with Ignaz Zadek, published the standard work "Die Differentialdiagnose der Lungenkrankheiten."12 He had already begun the work in 1935 at the hospital of the Jewish community in Berlin, but had not been able to finish it until after the war.13