Dr. Anna Bayerová: the First Official Female Doctor in Bosnia and Herzegovina
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Historical Article Narrative Review Acta Medica Academica 2019;48(1):121-126 DOI: 10.5644/ama2006-124.249 Dr. Anna Bayerová: The First Official Female Doctor in Bosnia and Herzegovina Brigitte Fuchs1, Husref Tahirović2 1Department of Cultural and Social This biographical note details Anna Bayerová’s (1853–1924) activi- Anthropology at the University of Vienna, ties as the first female Austro-Hungarian health officer in 1878 to1918 Vienna, Austria, 2Department of Medical occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). Anna Bayerová is known as Sciences of the Academy of Sciences and a heroine of Czech feminism and the ‘first Czech female physician’, Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, though she only practised in the Czech lands from 1913 to 1916. In Bosnia and Herzegovina 1891, Bayerová was enrolled as the first Austro-Hungarian female health officer and assigned to treat Muslim women in the district of Correspondence: Tuzla, Bosnia. She pursued this mission for the first three months of [email protected] Tel.: + 43 650 6505150 1892, had herself transferred to Sarajevo in the summer, and soon Fax.: + 43 1 4277 495 33 thereafter quitted the service. Her biographers point to a series of po- litical and personal motivations to abandon her mission in Bosnia, Received: 1 April 2019 which, from the viewpoint of Czech feminists, included fulfilling her Accepted: 25 April 2019 professional duties in an exemplary way. She spent most of her profes- Key Words: Medical History of Austro- sional life as a physician in Switzerland and did not request Austrian Hungarian Occupied BH . Treatment of recognition of her medical degree until 1913. Bayerová died in Prague Muslim Women by Female Physicians in 1924. Conclusion. Bayerová, partly for political reasons and partly . Anna Bayerová . Bayerová’s Medical due to her panic-fuelled fear of catching tuberculosis, quitted her role Practice in Tuzla . Bayerová’s Political as the first Austro-Hungarian female health officer in BH soon after Activities in Sarajevo. her arrival in 1892. Introduction involved into the anti-alcohol campaign- ing linked to contemporaneous European Anna Bayerová (1853–1924), a heroine of movements of temperance and social reform Czech feminism, is known as the ‘first Czech (9). She owed her prominence to her close female physician’. Several detailed biogra- ties with the Czech women’s movement and phies have been dedicated to her memory her lead role in Czech feminists’ and Aus- (1-4), and she appears in contemporaneous trian social democrats’ campaigns to admit Czech (5) and German (6, 7) national physi- women to academic, particularly medical, cians’ listings and international female phy- educational institutions. These parties felt sicians’ encyclopaedias (8). In Switzerland, that female physicians would improve poor the German Empire and Austria, her name women’s and children’s access to healthcare was once Germanised as ‘Anna Bayer’. (10). Bayerová helped to articulate this mis- Bayerová finished her medical studies sion in Ženské Listy, the journal of the Czech in Berne in 1881 and spent most of her ac- women’s movement, from the early 1880s tive live in Switzerland where she became (11). 121 Copyright © 2019 by the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Acta Medica Academica 2019;48(1):121-126 When in 1891 Bénjamin de Kállay, Aus- first female doctor in BH, based on the vast tria-Hungary’s Joint Minister of Finance and Czech literature on her life and activities de-facto governor of the occupied Ottoman (21, 22, 13). province Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH), created a position for an Austro-Hungarian female health officer, Bayerová was consid- Bayerová’s Short Biography ered predestined to pioneer the broader im- Bayerová was born into a lower-middle-class plementation of a feminist concept of public family in Melník, a small town 30 kilometres health and women’s studies in Austria (12). north of Prague, on November 4, 1853.1 She Austro-Hungarian universities did not ad- attended the first Czech collegiate school for mit female students until 1897, but Kállay girls, which had been founded by the Czech was convinced that the prioritized modern- Women Professionals’ Association in Prague ization of BH required extraordinary mea- (Ženský Výrobní Spolek Český v Praze). The sures, not least of which included employ- doyenne of the Czech womens’s movement ing female physicians to educate the rural and editor in chief of Ženské Listy, Eliška (female) population about public health and Krásnohorská herself seems to have encour- hygiene (13). aged Bayerová to realize her ‘great dream’ of First, Kállay agreed with contemporary becoming a physician and raised funds for international (14) and Czech feminist ar- her to attend a Swiss university (23). guments that the improvement of working In 1874, Bayerová took the general quali- class and poor rural women’s and children’s fication for university entrance exam (Ma- health depended on a public health system tura) in Switzerland and enrolled at the Uni- with state-employed female physicians (14). versity of Zurich. In 1877, she transferred Second, a systematic Austro-Hungarian to the University of Berne and earned her health census of the Bosnian population had medical degree in 1881, one year after her revealed the spread of infectious diseases compatriot Bohuslava Kecková (1854–1911) such as peculiarly (not sexually transmitted) was awarded a degree in Zurich. However, endemic syphilis (frenjak), the eradication because of Bayerová‘s involvement in the of which was considered another Austro- Czech women’s movement, she was the one Hungarian priority regarding the ‘occupied who would be celebrated in Ženské Listy and territory’ (15). Third, the fact that 35 percent the Journal of Czech Physicians as the ‘first of Bosnia’s population was Muslim (16) justi- Czech female physician’ in 1881. fied the argument that women’s healthcare be In 1882, Bayerová volunteered as an as- performed by female physicians to accom- sistant doctor at the Royal Maternity Clin- modate ‘religious modesty’ (17). Thus, Kállay ic in Dresden, directed by the renowned avoided any protest from Austro-Hungarian German gynaecologist Franz von Winckel medical bodies, while the Czech women’s (1837–1911), who supported ‘women’s movement succeeded in placing Anna Bay- need of female physicians’ (‘Aerztinnen für erová as the first female Austro-Hungarian Frauen’ in German) (24). Subsequently, Bay- health officer in BH. However, Bayerová is erová took over a medical office in Teufen, a not sufficiently recognized in the medical village near St. Gallen in Switzerland, which historiography of BH (18-20), so this paper proved to be poorly attended. In 1887, she will be the first article written only about Dr. 1Bayerová’s earlier biographers gave 1854 as the year of Anna Bayerova published in BH. her birth, while more recent international biographies This paper aims to present a short bi- state it as 1852. Following Czech sources, the correct ography of Bayerová and her work as the year is 1853. 122 Brigitte Fuchs and Husref Tahirović: Anna Bayerová: The First Official Female Doctor in BH requested and received nationalization in At that time, living conditions in BH Switzerland in order to establish her own were very poor. The level of education, espe- practice in Berne (23). cially among the female Muslim population, In 1891, Krásnohorská urged Bayerová to was insufficient; there were many epidemics apply for the advertised position of a female of infectious diseases, and the mortality rate physician in Tuzla, a small town in the north- was high. On January 1, 1892, Bayerová as- east region of BH. She was accepted by de- sumed her duties in Tuzla (21). According facto governor Kállay, who summoned her to her own official report, between January for a confidential conversation in Vienna in and March she treated 118 female patients, December. According to Bayerová, Kállay of whom 47 were Muslim, and visited 213 instructed her personally to educate Bosnian Muslim women of the district in their homes Muslim women about hygiene (21). She was (23). While she wrote in private letters to her immediately transferred to Sarajevo, where friends that she was delighted with her work she was sworn into the office of ‘provincial with ‘those uneducated and friendly women’ female physician’ (Landesärztin) (21) in the (12), she was continuously involved in con- rank of a captain of the Austro-Hungarian flicts with her superiors from the very be- army (Picture 1). ginning of her service. She complained, with good reason, about the disorganization sur- rounding her ad hoc created office and her low remuneration. The Austro-Hungarian army had supplied her with neither accom- modation nor an office. Bayerová was forced to organise both facilities, for which her sal- ary proved to be insufficient. The question of whether she was expected to charge patients a fee remained unresolved, and when she decided to treat poor women cost free, she personally had to pay for their medication (21). According to Nečas, she sought con- tinuously to practise her own concept of a female physician’s duty, to treat and help ‘all women’, while her superiors urged her to re- strict her caregiving to Muslim women. She was also required to visit the district’s Mus- lim villages on horseback, though she had never learned to ride (21). Bayerová considered her work thwarted by the Austro-Hungarian army and sought the intervention of Kállay, who was ready to support her claims and ideas. At Bayerová’s instigation, the Minister created the role of ‘female health officer’ (Amtsärztin) at a fixed, Picture 1. Anna Bayerová (1891) in the uniform of adjusted remuneration. He also decreed that the Austro-Hungarian army while serving as a ‘pro- vincial female physician’ of Bosnia (Landesärztin an Austro-Hungarian female health officer in Bosnien).