Short Report: Jewish Hospitals and Nursing Schools in Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918

Abstract

Any discussion of Jewish nursing schools must first turn its attention to Jewish hospitals.1 In 1910, the Habsburg monarchy had a Jewish population of 2,224,914, the majority living under adverse economic conditions in Galicia and Hungary. The cities with the largest Jewish populations were Budapest, Vienna, Lemberg, Krakow, and Czernowitz. The largest Jewish hospitals were situated in Vienna, Budapest, Lemberg, Krakow, Brody, Tarnow, and Prague. All but one in Prague were privately run. Of course, Jewish patients could be found in non-Jewish hospitals, too, but there also existed several dozen Jewish hospitals and sanatoria throughout the Habsburg Monarchy. In his study of German-Jewish hospitals, Thomas Schlich attributes their robust existence to the fact that general hospitals often did not take into consideration the special needs of Jewish patients, such as kosher food and traditional Jewish practices relating to death. There was, furthermore, a justified fear of attempts to convert Jewish patients to Christianity.2 With the exception of Germany, very little is known about how nursing in Jewish hospitals in middle and eastern Europe was organized during the nineteenth century.3 In addition to the hospitals, there existed a whole network of organizations and associations dedicated to the care of the sick and the dead. One of the oldest of these was the chewra kadischa, the Jewish burial society. This holy brotherhood developed among central European Jewry during the sixteenth century. In many communities, this organization formed the nucleus of Jewish life. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, less religiously motivated associations were established within both Christian and Jewish society. They were often organized on a mutual basis among specific groups according to profession or geographical origin, and can be viewed as a prototype of health insurance. So, for example, in 1844, the Verein fur Krankenpflege und Unterstutzung handlungsangehoriger Israeliten in Wien, a self-help organization of traders, was founded. The Kranken- und Unterstutzungsverein der Brodyer in Wien was an association for migrants that began life in 1912; and Krankenpflege, the Jewish women's association in Vienna, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1911. At the end of the nineteenth century, the question of women in the workforce was a hotly debated topic. If feminists argued, for egalitarian reasons, that women should have free access to all professions, even persons of a more conservative bent were forced to admit that, while not all women could marry or wanted to marry, marriage itself was no guarantee of economic security. The same held true for Jewish society. Apart from (unpaid) philanthropic activities, professions in the social field were deemed the most acceptable for bourgeois women to enter. For Jewish just as much as for non-Jewish nursing schools, the first steps in the professionalization of nursing were taken not in Vienna but in Prague, where, as early as 1890, the Section zur Heranbildung israelitischer Krankenpflegerinnen was created. This was a section for the training of Jewish nurses, part of the Central-Vereines zur Pflege judischer Angelegenheiten (Central Association for Jewish affairs). The Kaiserin Elisabeth-Institut fur israelitische Krankenpflegerinnen-the Jewish nursing school in Vienna-opened only eighteen years later, in 1908. In Vienna, the training took one and a half years, in Prague, a mere six months. The two schools had a very different organizational structure. Unlike their sisters in Prague, the women in Vienna had failed in their attempt to found a nursing school under their own direction.4 While the school in Vienna was closely attached to the Rothschild Hospital, which then boasted about 170 beds and was the largest hospital in the monarchy, the organization in Prague was not answerable to the hospital, even if the practical training itself was conducted at the sixty-bed Jewish Hospital in Prague. …