How to Fail: Female Medical Students and Women Doctors in Popular Fiction around 1900

Abstract

This article is based on novels in the German language, translations into German included, whose protagonists or important minor characters are woman doctors or female medical students. The time frame begins with the admission of women to (European) universities in the second half of the 19th century and extends into the middle of the 20th century. How did authors cope with this new figure, the female (medical) student, the woman doctor? The subject of failure shows up surprisingly often in early stories about female medical students and woman doctors. Following several subjects which were negotiated in the contemporary discourses of the time, I am going to demonstrate the ways that led women respectively female literary characters who wished to become physicians to failure: nursing, success (as strange as it sounds), nonexistent role models, and the fear of loneliness, all expressing conflicts due to gender stereotypes.