Rahel Hirsch, whose 150th birthday was celebrated on 15 September 2020, is one of the female pioneers of medicine in Germany. Since it was not yet possible for women to study medicine in Germany at the end of the 19th century, she initially worked as a teacher. In 1898 she went to Switzerland to study medicine, graduating in Strasbourg in 1903. From 1903 to 1919 she worked in the 2nd Medical Clinic of the Berlin Charité hospital. Due to her scientific achievements, she was the first female medical doctor in Prussia to be awarded the title of professor in 1913. Her early investigations into the permeability of the intestinal mucosa for large corpuscular particles and their renal elimination were initially met with rejection and ignorance. It took more than half a century until the phenomena she discovered found their way into the specialist literature as the "Hirsch effect". After the First World War, Rahel Hirsch worked mainly in her own practice. As a Jew during the dictatorship of the National Socialists, she was marginalised and increasingly endangered, and emigrated to England in 1938. There she lived in modest circumstances and died in London in 1953. Rahel Hirsch, who asserted herself in a male-dominated environment both as a doctor and as a scientist, is a suitable role model for those who work for more gender equality in medicine and society today.
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