Literature and Medicine I

by Gabriela Schenk, University of Zurich, Switzerland

1As the first German-speaking university to grant women degrees, the University of Zurich in Switzerland is frequently mentioned in fiction – if not by name, then by description: Johanna Spyri’s protagonist Sina (Sina [1884]) and Ilse Frapan-Akunian’s Josephine (Arbeit [1903]), for instance, study in Zurich. While passionate discussions about university access for women still ran high in Germany, a surprisingly pragmatic position was taken up at the (then small and new) University of Zurich. Women had been allowed to attend classes as guest auditors since the university’s opening, and in 1867 the first woman, a Russian called Nadezda Suslova, was officially matriculated at the faculty of medicine (Verein Feminist. 17). Even if female medical students were still rare at the University of Zurich until far into the twentieth century, women were nevertheless at least able to study and graduate; the only other university in Europe that granted degrees to women was in Paris. Taking this progressive attitude, based in fact and mirrored in popular literature, as a starting point for analysis, this article about female physicians in (popular) fiction examines novels in German, including translations into German, whose main figure or important minor character is a woman doctor or a female medical student. The timeframe extends from the admission of women to European universities in the second half of the nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth century, with the main focus on works around 1900.

2The admission of women to medical studies was a vehemently discussed topic in the contemporary media, along with related conflicts concerning their training, professionalization, and social position. Power structures were shaken by the combination of women obtaining a medical degree (which signifies power over the human body) and feminist demands for women’s social, economic, and political equality. These social problems were also discussed and negotiated in contemporary fictional texts by means of the newly created character of the woman doctor and vice versa the literary discussions in turn took part in non-fictional discourses – or not, indicating which issues could and could not be negotiated in literature and/or in connection with women around 1900.[1] For the idea of negotiation and circulation see Greenblatt. So when and on what terms did women doctors appear as literary characters? When did the newly established fact find its record in literature, i.e., fiction?

3In this article, I will only briefly touch on the battle for and intense discussions about equal rights and higher education for women and all the attendant discourses conducted in politics, medicine, law, economics, etc., that have already been described in detail in many works. For the contextualization of the exemplary novels I have chosen for this article, I concentrate on the facts that explain and explicate my textual examples. The chosen works demonstrate the wide range of literature in which women doctors appear, including novels by both male and female writers, young adult fiction and general fiction, and translated works.

4Researching my article, I was soon struck by the surprisingly frequent subject of failure that showed up in the early stories that came into my hands. The fact that authors sketched talented young women eager and determined to study, overcoming every obstacle to do so, only to let them fail in the end, caused more than just a mild irritation. Intelligent as well as highly motivated, the women nevertheless, after a brief struggle more with circumstances than with their own ambitions, give up their studies, profession, or own career in the end in order to marry or to further a man’s career. This is the case even when the man is a son, as for Lisa Wenger’s protagonist Marie Zuberbühler in Die Wunderdoktorin (1910):

Alles was ihr sonst Freude gemacht hatte, wurde ihr gleichgültig. Nur das Eine blieb für sie bestehen, dass der Sohn fort musste, hinausgedrängt durch die Mutter. Das durfte nicht sein. [...] Einmal, in einer schlaflosen Nacht durchzuckte es sie wie ein Blitz. In grellem Licht stand ein Ausweg vor ihr, und in demselben Augenblick wusste sie, dass es der Weg war, den sie gehen musste. Wie ein Messer schnitt es ihr ins Herz und nahm ihr den Atem. Mit weit offenen Augen lag sie und starrte ins Leere. Was da vor ihr aufstand und sie wie eine Riesin aus mächtigen Augen mahnend ansah, war die Entsagung. (290)

5How did authors cope with this new figure of the female (medical) student or woman doctor? Why let her fail so often? Examining several subjects which were negotiated in contemporary discourses, I am going to demonstrate the ways, e.g., nursing, success (as strange as it sounds), exceptionalism, and nonexistent role models that led women, specifically female protagonists who wished to become physicians, to failure.