Adrienne von Speyr

Adrienne von Speyr (1902 to 1967) was a Swiss physician, Catholic convert, mystic and author of some sixty books of spirituality and theology. She was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, into an upper-middle-class Protestant family; her father was an ophthalmologist, and visiting sick children with him at the hospital sparked her wish to become a physician and led her toward a career as a family doctor. Illness, including spondylitis and tuberculosis, marked her youth, and she spent time at a sanatorium at Leysin. She studied in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel between 1923 and 1926, and her experience of medical practice shaped her convictions about the physician's responsibility for patients, medicine as self-giving service, the treatment of the whole person and accompanying the dying to the end. She converted to Catholicism in 1940, at the age of thirty-eight, and recounted her spiritual experiences to her confessor Hans Urs von Balthasar.