Rahel Hirsch

Rahel Hirsch (1870 to 1953) was a German physician and professor at the Charité medical school in Berlin. She was born in Frankfurt am Main, worked as a teacher until 1898 because German universities did not admit women to medicine, studied medicine in Zurich, Leipzig and Strasbourg, and earned her medical doctorate in 1903. In 1906 she showed that small solid particles could pass through the kidneys into the urine, a finding later called the Hirsch effect. She headed the polyclinic of the Charité medical clinic from 1908 and then ran her own internal medicine practice in Berlin. In 1913 she became the first woman in the Kingdom of Prussia appointed a professor of medicine. Her licence was cancelled in 1938 and she fled to England, where she died in 1953.