Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner

Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner (1871-1935) was a bacteriologist and women's rights campaigner, born in Kaunas, then part of the Russian Empire. Because women could not study there, she went to Switzerland in 1889 and took her doctorate at Bern in 1894 with a thesis on the fruiting bodies of gasteromycete fungi. That year she became the first and only woman employed at Robert Koch's Institute for Infectious Diseases in Berlin. In 1895 she identified the agent of bovine tuberculosis in the products of a large Berlin dairy and kept stressing its danger to humans, and her campaign helped bring about pasteurisation of raw milk. She taught bacteriology in Philadelphia, studied malaria in Montenegro and Albania, investigated plague in Odessa, and worked from 1903 to 1919 as an assistant at the Charité pathological institute. In 1912 she became only the second woman in Prussia to receive the title of professor. She edited the Zeitschrift für Tuberkulose from 1914 and was forced out of her post at the end of 1933 because of her Jewish descent.