Rosalie Satter-Feuerstein: An Austro-Hungarian Official Female Physician in Bosnia and Herzegovina - 1914-1919

Abstract

This short biography traces the life and medical activities of Rosalie Sattler, née Feuerstein (1883–19??), who was employed as an official female physician at the Austro-Hungarian (AH) provincial public health department in Sarajevo from 1914–1919. Born in 1883 into a Jewish middle-class family in Chernivtsi (then Czernowitz), Ukraine, in Bukovina, the easternmost province in Austria, Feuerstein moved to Vienna in 1904 to study medicine. After earning her MD from Vienna University in 1909, she started her career as an assistant physician at the Kaiser Franz Josef Hospital in Vienna. In spring 1912, Feuerstein moved to Sarajevo to work as an intern at the local provincial hospital (Landeskrankenhaus). In the same year, she married AH district physician Moritz Sattler (1873–1927) in Vienna. In 1914, Sattler-Feuerstein successfully applied to be an AH official female physician in Bosnia. She was an employee of the provincial public health department in Sarajevo and never functioned as an official female physician in the sense of the relevant AH service ordinance. After the collapse of the monarchy, Sattler-Feuerstein continued to be employed as an official female physician of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. She resigned from service in 1919 and established herself as a private general practitioner in Sarajevo with her husband, who had also resigned as an official physician and started to practice privately at that point. Widowed in 1927, she left Sarajevo for an unknown destination, likely in 1938–1939, and vanished from historical records.

Conclusion. Rosalie Sattler-Feuerstein (1883–19??) came to Bosnia as the eighth AH official female physician and worked as an employee of the AH provincial public health department in Sarajevo from 1914–1919, after which she practiced as a private physician in Sarajevo for more than 25 years.