Dorothea Erxleben
Today, a new look at Dorothea Erxleben. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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Years ago, I did an episode about one Dorothea Erxleben, born in 1715. Germany’s first woman doctor. The daughter of a doctor, she’d followed her brother to medical school in Halle. She, a woman, couldn’t graduate, but she studied right along with him.
Then, at age twenty-seven, she wrote an influential book, arguing the case for women. Just look at the title: “A Thorough Inquiry into the Causes Preventing the Female Sex from Studying.”
Dorothea Erxleben
Frederick the Great had by then granted her permission to finish her doctorate at Halle. But she’d just married and returned to her home in Quedlinburg, Germany. There she worked in her father’s medical office. And, she actually practiced medicine along with him. When he died, five years later, she kept right on practicing. And drew a good deal of flak for that. So, at age thirty-nine, she did go back to Halle, did take final exams, and did submit her dissertation.
She was now certified. Germany’s first woman doctor. So let’s look inside that dissertation. For there’s where the fun begins. You see, doctoring was a different business back then. Doctors did very little, if any, surgery. Serious cutting was the work of a different class of healers. Doctors of her day would decide what medicines and external treatments would heal a patient. And Erxleben had strong opinions about how they went about it.
In fact, the title of her dissertation roughly translates to: Academic Treatise on the All-too-Swift-and-Pleasant, But therefore often Unreliable, Cure of Diseases.
She saw doctors seeking to relieve suffering in a way that actually endangered the healing of patients. They did so with the help of often potent analgesics, purgatives and such – like, say, opium. Erxleben was intent on making people see that such brief relief could do more harm than good.
So she now translated her dissertation. It’d been written (as was the custom) in Latin. Her German version greatly expanded upon it. Now it offered advice, not only to future doctors, but to lay readers as well. Still, she did not yet have solutions to cancers, lung disease, cardiac blockages and such.
Title page of the German version of Erxleben’s dissertation
She spoke, instead, of both understanding and managing our bodily emissions – vomiting, sweating, evacuating, menstruating,coughing up ... But she was downright evangelical about pointing to the danger of sending a patient home with the pain gone, and the actual illness still intact. That argument was radical.
Today, Erxleben is famous for advancing the role of women. But we forget that she had done much more. She’d insisted that doctors do better. She had made the terribly important point that making patients feel better was not to be confused with curing them.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Dorothea Erxleben | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
Click here for the full text of Dorothea Erxleben’s German version of her dissertation
This Episode first aired on September 29, 2026.