The options open to even a brilliant woman who sought a destiny other than marriage and children in the late nineteenth century were few. Franziska Tiburtius helped women break through one important barrier. Caring for her ill physician brother, she was seized with the desire to become a medical doctor herself. With all other European universities closed to her, she matriculated at the University of Zürich, where she earned her M.D. degree. Barred from taking the medical exams necessary to set up a medical practice, she and her female physician-partner finally won the right to display their hard-earned medical credentials and set up working-class clinics in Berlin. For these accomplishments, the pioneering Dr. Tiburtius is remembered as the first degreed, practicing female physician in modern European history.
- A site that places Dr. Tiburtius in her context among other women struggling, in nineteenth-century Germany, for equal rights in the workplace is
http://www.channel1.com/users/bobwb/gwmtext/
- A readable and scholarly article on women physicians in the nineteenth century, with reference to Dr. Tiburtius, is available at
http://www.upstate.edu/library/history/cppblackwell.html
- The University of Zürich, where Dr. Tiburtius trained, became one of the few places that opened the medical curriculum to women. For a view of what medical training in the U.S. was like in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with several photos, visit
http://www.cl.utoledo.edu/canaday/quackery/quack10.html
