Rahel Hirsch

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Rahel Hirsch circa 1914
Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Kurfürstendamm 220, in Berlin-Charlottenburg
Berlin street sign of Rahel-Hirsch-Strasse with dedication

Rahel Hirsch (born September 15, 1870 in Frankfurt am Main , † October 6, 1953 in London ) was a German doctor . In 1913 she was the first woman to be appointed professor of medicine in Germany (in the Kingdom of Prussia ) . The permeability of the mucous membrane of the small intestine for large-sized particles and the subsequent excretion with the urine , which she discovered , was named after her Hirsch effect .

Life

Hirsch was born as one of eleven children of Mendel Hirsch (1833-1900), the director of the secondary school for girls of the Israelite religious community in Frankfurt am Main. After graduating from high school in 1885, she began studying pedagogy in Wiesbaden , which she completed in 1889. She then worked as a teacher until 1898 . In order to escape the unsatisfactory teaching profession, she enrolled in Zurich to study medicine because it was not possible for a woman in Germany . Shortly afterwards she moved to Leipzig and Strasbourg (which belonged to the Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine from 1871 to 1918 ), where she passed her state examination in July 1903 and received her license to practice medicine on July 13th.

After completing her doctorate , she became Friedrich Kraus' assistant at the Charité in Berlin . After Helenefriederike Stelzner, who also published, she was the second doctor in the history of the clinic. Hirsch devoted himself exclusively to research. She was interested in the intestinal mucosa and the effect she observed in experiments of the transition of large-body food particles, e.g. B. starch grains, from the intestinal tract to the urinary tract. In November 1907 she was the first woman to be invited to present her findings to the conference of the Society of Chief Physicians at the Charité. However, her colleagues rejected the process that she described and later documented as inconclusive. Nevertheless, their medical reputation remained undiminished. Under the care of Kraus, she took over the management of the Polyclinic of the Second Medical Clinic at the Charité in 1908 and was awarded the title of professor in 1913 as the first female doctor in Prussia and the third in the German Empire . However, she was denied a lectureship or a chair. This treatment by the clinic - also from a financial point of view, because she was not paid a salary - was the reason to leave the Charité in 1919 and to concentrate fully on her practice, which had now moved from Schöneberger Ufer 31 to Königin-Augusta-Straße 22. In 1928 she opened an internal practice with an X-ray institute at Kurfürstendamm 220.

From 1906 to 1919, Germany's first female medical professor lived at 57 Schöneberger Ufer, today's headquarters of the Berlin Artists' Association .

The seizure of power by the Nazi regime had for the Jewish Hirsch result, her health insurance license was revoked and she was not allowed to treat non-Jews. In October 1938 she gave up her practice and emigrated to London, where one of her sisters lived. Because her license to practice medicine was not recognized by the British authorities, she first worked as a laboratory assistant and later as a translator .

She spent the last years of her life - plagued by depression , delusions and persecution fears - in a mental hospital on the outskirts of London, where she died on October 6, 1953 at the age of 83.

Posthumous honor

Memorial to Rahel Hirsch by Susanne Wehland in the gardens of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin

Four years after her death, Gerhard Volkheimer , assistant to Hirsch's former colleague Theodor Brugsch at the Charité, took up Hirsch's findings on the permeability of the kidney wall in his habilitation thesis and confirmed them. In memory of the discoverer, he named the proven process Hirsch effect . The State of Israel honored Hirsch with the inclusion in the gallery of famous Jewish scientists in Jerusalem . The Charité only remembered the work of its medical pioneer very late. In 1995, a bronze sculpture designed by Susanne Wehland was placed in front of the clinic's old internal medicine lecture hall.

A street at Berlin Central Station has been named after her since 2006 .

In 2013, Deutsche Post published a commemorative stamp on the occasion of "100 Years of Professor Rahel Hirsch" worth 145 cents.

In 2013 the Upper School Center for Health / Medicine in Berlin-Hellersdorf was named after her.

On June 2, 2016 , a Berlin memorial plaque was placed at her former place of residence, Berlin-Charlottenburg , Kurfürstendamm 220 .

Publications

  • Rahel Hirsch: About the occurrence of starch grains in the blood and urine. In: Journal for experimental pathology and therapy , 3rd year, 1906, p. 390 ff.
  • Rahel Hirsch: About the transfer of corpuscular elements into the urine. In: Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift , Volume 45, 1908, p. 331.
  • Rahel Hirsch: body culture of women . Urban & Schwarzenberg, Vienna 1913.
  • Rahel Hirsch, Friedrich Kraus : Accident and internal medicine . Springer 1914.

literature

Web links

Commons : Rahel Hirsch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Wolfgang U. Eckart : Hirsch, Rahel , in: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the 20th century . 1st edition. 1995 CH Beck Munich pp. 189 + 190, medical dictionary. From antiquity to the present , 2nd edition. 2001, p. 163, 3rd edition. 2006 Springer Verlag, Heidelberg / Berlin / New York pp. 170 + 171. doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .
  2. ↑ a b Eva-Bettina Bröcker : Frau Doktor - and what then? In: Würzburger medical history reports , 23, 2004, pp. 589–592; here: p. 589.
  3. ↑ Helenefriederike Stelzner: Years at Risk in the Sexual Life of a Woman. Lehmann, Munich 1936.
  4. ↑ Bernhard Meyer: It was only after 50 years that people spoke of the »Hirsch effect« . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 1, 1998, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 33-38 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  5. ↑ Friederike: News Tiergarten Süd Mittendran. News in the middle, accessed on November 6, 2019 .
  6. ↑ post.de
personal data
SURNAME Hirsch, Rachel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, first woman to be appointed professor of medicine in the Kingdom of Prussia
DATE OF BIRTH September 15, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1953
Place of death London