The genre of Würzburg crime novels gets company: A newly published female doctor novel with “local color” is aimed at historically interested female readers. The setting for the two-volume work is the Juliusspital, which at least equaled that of the Berlin Charité or the Viennese clinics in the mid-19th century.
At this time, Würzburg Hospital always offered narrative material for captivating films such as the much-watched television episode about the Charité, as Virchow, Koelliker and Scanzoni were important doctors who attracted numerous students and made important scientific discoveries.
The two authors, the twin sisters Claudia and Nadja Beinert (born in 1978), worked intensively into the local history of Würzburg at the time, in order to prepare the stylish setting for their historical novel and to become familiar with the “historical staff”, who alongside the fictional main characters occurs to be able to think inside.
The banker’s daughter is expelled from the family
To the content: Viviana, the banker’s daughter, unwanted as improperly pregnant by a stonemason and rejected by the family with a reputation, hires herself as a pharmacy maid in the Julius Hospital, comes into contact with the medical luminaries there around Rudolph Virchow and wants to study medicine, which of course was not then was possible.
The double perspective from the perspective of the bank and the doctor enables a broad description of the conditions in Würzburg around the middle of the century. The medical historian is happy when the fascinating scientific and social history of the era is conveyed in a life-like and entertaining way, as it were. Of course, clichés have to be served, roles have to be cast and expectations of the novel reader have to be fulfilled, but the historical medical personalities, as far as the sources indicate, are characterized realistically.
Discussion about studying women is brought forward in the novel
The local historian, on the other hand, is uncomfortable that the exciting and well-documented discussion about studying women in Würzburg around 1890 has to be brought forward for the sake of Virchow for decades, which leads to masquerades, conspiratorial meetings in the casemates, spies, dramatic arrests and a final masked ball showdown in the Juliusspitalhof is necessary – everything is very unlikely for Würzburg, little historical and in clear contrast to the otherwise so careful research into local history.
Especially since, for example, Josepha or Charlotte von Siebold, who successfully found their own way into medicine through obstetrics in Hesse, could have fulfilled their dream realistically as role models of the “doctor out of passion”.
Exciting and entertaining reading material
But perhaps this is too schoolmasterly thought: the general interested reader looking for exciting, emotional novel reading will – and may – not be bothered by it, of course, and more by the lust for fables and the drastic and dramatic twists and turns of the multifaceted family history with its entanglements, entanglements and delight in unexpected turns.
Anyone familiar with classic evening series will understand medical terms or simply ignore them and calmly ignore anachronisms. And then the women’s movement in Würzburg may also be active earlier in order to make Viviana, a pioneering figure in emancipation, the revolutionary counterpart of Virchow’s scientific revolution.
It is amusing to read the character descriptions of the fictional main characters, which are, of course, heavily oversubscribed, but coherent, and the sometimes burlesque scenes in the bank and hospital. The “Doctor from Passion” offers exciting and entertaining reading material on 572 pages.
The paperback has been published by Knaur and is available from bookstores for 9.99 euros. The following volume, which is playing at the time of the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, has been announced for August.
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Wurzburg
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Andreas Mettenleiter
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emancipation
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Familys
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Family history
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Obstetrics
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Historical novels
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Hospitals and clinics
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Medical historian
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Physicists
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Social history
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Wilhelm
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Wilhelm Conrad
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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
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doctors
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