Rahel Hirsch

Rahel Hirsch (15 September 1870 – 6 October 1953) was a German physician and professor at the Charité medical school in Berlin. In 1913 she became the first woman in the Kingdom of Prussia to be appointed a professor of medicine.

Biography Rahel Hirsch was born on 15 September 1870 in Frankfurt am Main, one of eleven children of Mendel Hirsch (1833–1900). Mendel Hirsch was the director of the girls' school of the Jewish religious community in Frankfurt am Main. Mendel's fatherRahel's paternal grandfatherwas the eminent rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

From 1885 to 1889, Rahel Hirsch studied for her degree in education in Wiesbaden; she then worked until 1898 as a teacher. The German Reich did not permit women to study medicine so she studied in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1899 she continued to study in Leipzig, Germany and Strasbourg, France to earn her medical doctor title in 1903.

She was then hired to work at the Medical Clinic of the University of Berlin at the Charité as an intern. The Charité was militarily strong and she was the second female to ever be hired here. Hirsch worked as an assistant to the physiologist Professor Friedrich Krause. Rahel Hirsch worked alongside the surgeon Ernst von Bergmann and the anatomist Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz. In England, Hirsch could not practise as a doctor: instead she worked as a librarian and a laboratory assistant. During the war she lived in Yorkshire, returning to London afterwards. Her treatment by the Nazis manifested itself in the form of depression, hallucinations and a persecution complex; as a result, she was committed to Friern Hospital in North London, where she died on 6 October 1953.

Legacy Her reputation was upheld by G. Volkheimer. Many internal medicine textbooks refer to the “Hirsch Effekt” and the State of Israel honored her by including her in the gallery of Famous Jewish Scientists in Jerusalem. In 1995, a bronze statue of Rahel Hirsch stands in the old lecture hall at the Charité. The Rahel-Hirsch-Schule, a vocational sixth-form centre with an emphasis on medical-related training, was thus named in 2013. It lies in the Hellersdorf district, about to the east of the Charité.

A road in front of the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof now bears her name.

The Charité/Berlin Institute of Health's new Ambulanz-, Translations- und Innovationszentrum was topped out in July 2020 and on 19 January 2023 was named the "Rahel Hirsch Center for Translational Medicine". The ceremony was attended by the current Mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, as well as Charité officials and Hirsch's relatives from London.