Anna Tomaszewicz-Dobrska

Anna Tomaszewicz-Dobrska (1854 to 1918) was a Polish physician and a pioneer among women in medicine. Born in Mlawa in 1854, she took her medical degree at Zurich in 1877 and is recorded as the second Polish woman to become a medical doctor and the first Polish woman doctor to practice in Poland. During her fifth year of study she worked as an assistant to the neurologist and psychiatrist Edward Hitzig at the Zurich institute for the mentally ill. After brief work in Berlin and Vienna she was barred from the state examination that would have licensed her in Poland and was refused membership of the Polish Society of Medicine because she was a woman, so she passed the state examination in St. Petersburg instead. That allowed her to practice women's health and paediatric medicine in the Polish Kingdom and in Russia. When an epidemic of childbirth infection struck Warsaw in 1882 she was given charge of maternity shelter number 2 on Prosta Street and led it until 1911, and in 1896 she became the first to perform a Caesarean section in Warsaw. She was also among the founders of the Society of Polish Culture.