Women neuropsychiatrists on Wagner-Jauregg’s staff in Vienna at the time of the Nobel award: ordeal and fortitude

Abstract

This article profiles the scientific lives of six women physicians on the staff of the Clinic of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna in 1927, the year when its Director, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They were all of Jewish descent and had to leave Austria in the 1930s to escape from the National Socialist regime. With a solid background in brain science and mental disorders, Alexandra Adler, Edith Klemperer, Annie Reich, Lydia Sicher and Edith Vincze pursued academic careers in the USA, while Fanny Halpern spent 18 years in Shanghai, where she laid the foundations of modern Chinese psychiatry, before going to Canada. At the dawn of their medical careers, they were among the first women to practise neurology and psychiatry, both in Austria and overseas.