Rahel Zipkin, Sophia Getzowa, Elisabeth Sanderson-Damberg: Three Women From Early-20th-Century Bern, Switzerland-Their Lives, Research, and Impact on Pathology of the Thyroid.

Abstract

Women were a minority population among medical students, and subsequently as doctors, at the beginning of the 20th century. This was true for all branches of medicine. The field of thyroid pathology seems to have been an exception to this fact. Three young women from Bern, Switzerland, made major contributions to the microscopic anatomy of the thyroid: Rahel Zipkin, Sophia Getzowa, and Elisabeth Sanderson-Damberg. All 3 were mentees of Theodor Langhans, pathologist and professor at Bern, during the period 1905 to 1911. To document details about the lives of these women, to speculate about Sanderson-Damberg, as little is known about her, and to enunciate the discoveries in thyroid pathology made by the 3 remarkable protégés of Langhans and discuss their impact in our current understanding and in the reporting of thyroid pathology. PubMed, published scientific and historical literature, Archives of Universität Bern, and the Periodika database of the Latvian National Library. The discoveries made-hyalinizing trabecular neoplasm (Zipkin, 1905), solid cell nests (Getzowa, 1907; also water-clear and eosinophilic cells of the parathyroid, 1907), and Sanderson polsters (Sanderson-Damberg, 1911)-still hold true today and are of practical importance in pathology.