Emma Freisinger

Emma Freisinger

Emma Freisinger (born December 17, 1932 in Ebbs , Tyrol) is a former Austrian nurse who worked in the Republic of Korea from the early 1960s and mainly devoted herself to lepers . Emma Freisinger managed the hospital she founded in Daegu until she retired . In the last few decades she has received numerous awards for her selfless commitment.

Life

Between 1954 and 1958 Emma Freisinger was trained as a nurse in Salzburg . From 1958 she worked in the surgical department of the LKH Salzburg .

The first years in Korea

After the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910 to 1945), the Korean War broke out , which left both parts of the previously unified country as completely impoverished areas. When Emma Freisinger arrived in the Republic of Korea in 1961, the infrastructure was completely destroyed. The 1950s and 1960s were marked by famine and the constant threat of disease outbreaks . Medical care was in a rudimentary state. The lowest social class was formed by the lepers, most of whom were even shunned by their own families.

During the care and doctoring of the lepers, Emma Freisinger had several fundamental problems that made her work difficult:

• Due to the large number of sick people and the lack of medically trained staff, only a part of those affected could be cared for.
• The most necessary medicines were missing
• The poor infrastructure made the way to the sick, who lived scattered across the country (there were no treatment centers) extremely difficult: Many of those affected could only be reached by traveling in overcrowded buses on gravel roads, by walking for hours or by boat.
• The Korean climate, which is characterized by subtropical temperatures with up to 100 percent humidity in summer and by cold waves of up to minus 20 degrees Celsius in winter , and numerous floods in the coastal regions, which repeatedly filled entire houses up to a meter with water.
• Since hardly any of the patients spoke a foreign language other than Japanese, there were great communication difficulties at the beginning.

Foundation of the leprosy clinic

Since the situation offered little prospect of improvement in the first few years, Emma Freisinger turned to various aid organizations in order to be able to create the basic conditions for her work. With financial support from the Catholic Women's Movement in Austria , a green area was bought in 1963 on the outskirts of Daegu , where makeshift barracks were built to provide first aid for lepers. Water channels had to be dug first. The barracks housed dormitories and an outpatient clinic for skin diseases for the detection of early leprosy. In the beginning, Emma Freisinger often had to treat more than 100 patients a day on her own before she finally received support from a Korean university clinic. The principle of the Austrian nurse was to treat the lepers physically and mentally: the disease had to be cured and then it was necessary to reintegrate the affected into society.

In 1965 Emma Freisinger founded the Daegu Leper Hospital. To this end, the barracks built for emergency supplies were expanded and converted.

Cooperation with aid organizations

From 1966 more and more Korean hospitals joined forces and cooperated with the leprosy clinic. Together with the Catholic women's movement in Austria and the DAHW (German Leper Aid Organization), Emma Freisinger carried out countless aid projects until her retirement in 1996, such as education campaigns, school fees for children of lepers, loans for the sick and creating a livelihood for them. In 1978 the hospital was rebuilt at the same location. From now on, between 1000 and 1500 patients could be cared for in the new building.

Working in Korea after retirement

After her retirement, Emma Freisinger first ran an office in which donors were recruited for her social projects. Today this facility is run by other volunteers due to Emma Freisinger's advanced age. The income mainly goes into medication, rehabilitation measures and educational work.

Today Freisinger visits former patients regularly.

Freisinger never tried to go public. Few people know her life's work, mainly former patients, doctors and colleagues.

Awards

Emma Freisinger has received a variety of awards, including the Ho-Am Prize (2007), unofficially known as the Korean Nobel Prize . She donated the $ 200,000 prize money to her hospital.

Web links

• Archdiocese of Daegu - Daegu Leprosy Hospital on auslandsdienst.at
• More detailed biography on the website of the Austrian embassy in Seoul