During her career in the US, she published the first description of cases of Behçet's disease there, introduced patch testing for industrial employees in New York, and worked with Madge Thurlow Macklin.

Helene Ollendorff Curth, affectionately referred to as "Lene", was born on 28 February 1899, into a Jewish family in Wroclaw, Poland, then Breslau, Germany.

[1][2] Her father Isodor Ollendorf, was a lawyer and counsillor who died in 1911, and her mother Paula spent much of her life working to improve women's rights.

[2] Ollendorff Curth completed her early medical training under Josef Jadassohn, pioneer of patch testing, at the University of Breslau.

[2][6] At the same unit she met her future husband, Rudolf Wilhelm Paul Curth, a dermatologist who had arrived in the department in 1925 as another of Buschke's assistants; they married in 1927.

[9] Rare and hereditary, they found the disease to present with widespread painless small bumps in the skin, sometimes associated with bone involvement.

[5] At the invitation of Heinrich Adolf Gottron and Urs Walter Schnyder [de], she contributed a chapter to Jadassohn's Handbook of Skin and Venereal Diseases (1966).

[11][16] Ollendorff Curth was first to establish a set of criteria required to suspect a cancer when new skin signs appeared.