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  • Weibliche Ärzte: Die Durchsetzung des Berufsbildes in Deutschland
  • Thomas Neville Bonner
Eva Brinkschulte, ed. Weibliche Ärzte: Die Durchsetzung des Berufsbildes in Deutschland. 2d ed. Reihe Deutsche Vergangenheit, no. 108. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1993. 208 pp. Ill. DM 36.00; ÖS 281.00; Sw. Fr. 36.00 (paperbound).

Germany was the last of the industrialized nations to make a place for women in the practice of medicine. Even the argument that had worked so well elsewhere—that the Victorian-era woman needed a physician of her own sex—found little acceptance in Wilhelmine Germany. To the very end of the nineteenth century, the German women’s movement continued to rely heavily on the slogan “women physicians for women patients” rather than any assertion of equality of rights or opportunities. When the first women physicians were finally trained in Germany after 1900, they found places primarily as state insurance physicians for women employees in private firms, or as the caregivers for women in state institutions. Not until 1920 were women allowed to pursue advanced study to qualify for teaching positions ( habilitieren) in medical schools.

This slim book was assembled under some time pressures to accompany a 1994 exhibit on women physicians at the Benjamin Franklin University Clinic in Berlin. Largely the work of women medical students at the Institute of the History of Medicine of the Free University, it focuses on short biographies of a number of the pioneer women who were the first to practice medicine in the Reich. Most of these pioneers, especially before 1900, were educated in Zurich, whose doors had been open to women since the late 1860s. On returning to Germany, they were not permitted to take the state examinations necessary to qualify as physicians but could, along with other lesser healers, treat patients [End Page 176]under the 1871 “freedom to heal” ( Kurierfreiheit) law. The first two of the women trained in Zurich, Franziska Tiburtius and Emilie Lehmus, therefore established a modest clinic for poor women in Berlin in 1878; the city’s physicians largely ignored them or treated them with contempt, which hardly encouraged other women to follow a medical career. A number of women left for Zurich, but few completed their studies. In all, fourteen additional German women—including Anna Kuhnow, Agnes Bluhm, Agnes Hacker, and Pauline Plötz, all of whom settled in Berlin—completed their M.D. degrees in Zurich before 1900. Despite the formidable resistance at home, these early women physicians managed to establish modest practices, to carry out a few clinical investigations, and to write several books on popular medicine.

Once the fiercely defended barriers to women’s study began to fall at the end of the century, the pent-up demand brought hundreds of women to the highly reputed medical schools of Germany. By 1914, more than a thousand women were enrolled in medicine and Germany had passed the United States in the number of women in medical study. By this time the Prussian state had even granted the title of “Professor” to a redoubtable woman, Rahel Hirsch, who had done important research on the permeability of the bowel mucosa; later, the Jewish Hirsch, despite her achievements, would flee for her life from Hitler’s wrath.

One of the most important essays in the book is Johanna Bleker’s description of the role of women physicians in the Nazi years. Despite early discouragement of careers for females, the Third Reich found women physicians increasingly important as replacements for the large number of physicians called to military service. By the last year of the war, women made up three-quarters of all medical students at some universities. Contrary perhaps to all expectations and assumptions, women physicians proved as stout champions of the racist and brutal policies of the Nazi regime as their male colleagues. Women physicians joined the party in large numbers, became deeply involved in its eugenic and race-hygiene measures, worked in the extermination camps, and cooperated enthusiastically in forcing Jewish women colleagues out of the profession.

Though necessarily episodic and disconnected, these essays represent nevertheless an important deepening in Germany of scholarly interest in the history of its medical women.

Thomas Neville Bonner
Wayne State...

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