Dr. Amália Frisch among women and Wars, Istanbul to Budapest

Abstract

Amália Frisch was born in Edirne/Adrianople, Turkey, in 1882. She came from an immigrant Jewish family from Hungary. Following her graduation from the American College for Girls in Istanbul in 1901, she travelled to Switzerland for her medical education. Amália Frisch graduated from the school of medicine in Bern in 1907, and received her MD (Doctor universae medicinae) degree from Zurich University in 1908. She specialised in gynaecology at the Vienna University Clinics, before returning to Istanbul. In the December of 1908, Dr. Amália Frisch was appointed voluntary intern at the Austro-Hungarian Hospital in Galata to attend the women’s ward. During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 the hospital housed the wounded of the Turkish Army in its Pancaldi premises, and Amália Frisch received medals of merit for her services both from the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Reschad V. Amália Frisch was an active member of the Ottoman Society for the Protection of Women’s Rights (est. 1913). She was deported by the French occupation command in 1919 and returned to Budapest, after which she altered her profession to stomatology and dentistry. Amália Frisch passed away in Budapest during the Second World War, in 1941.